Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
50 free MIT trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
MIT trivia for engineers, applicants, alumni wearing the Brass Rat, and anyone who has ever measured a bridge in smoots. The quiz starts with William Barton Rogers, the geologist who got a charter signed two days before the Civil War began, the 'Boston Tech' years, the six attempts to swallow the school into Harvard, and the mysterious 'Mr Smith' whose money built the Cambridge campus in 1916. The middle rounds cover MIT's transformation: Karl Compton and Vannevar Bush, the Radiation Laboratory that rivalled the Manhattan Project, Whirlwind and Lincoln Lab, the Instrumentation Lab that guided Apollo, the 1969 research stoppage, the hacker culture born in a model railroad club, Richard Stallman's GNU, Project Athena, the Media Lab and OpenCourseWare. Later questions turn to campus life: mens et manus, Tim the Beaver, Course 6, IHTFP, the Infinite Corridor and MIThenge, the Great Dome hacks, Building 20, the Stata Center, the smoot, the Nobel count and the four MIT graduates who walked on the Moon. Questions run from easy to expert and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. See also our Harvard, Yale and universities quizzes.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01MIT is located in which city, across the Charles River from Boston?
Cambridge
MIT's campus is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the north bank of the Charles River; the Harvard Bridge carries Massachusetts Avenue from the campus to Boston's Back Bay.
Q 02In which year did Massachusetts' governor sign MIT's founding charter?
1861
Governor John Andrew signed MIT's charter on 10 April 1861; the Civil War delayed everything, and the first classes met only in 1865, in Boston's Mercantile Building.
Q 03MIT's founder William Barton Rogers was a scientist in which field?
geology
Rogers's field was geology: he directed Virginia's state geological survey and taught natural philosophy at the University of Virginia before moving to Boston in 1853.
Q 04By what informal name was MIT known in its early decades in the Back Bay?
Boston Tech
Boston Tech was MIT's everyday name while it sat on the Back Bay's filled land; an 1859 proposal for a 'Conservatory of Art and Science' on the same land had failed.
Q 05MIT was funded in its early years under which 1862 federal law?
the Morrill Land-Grant Act
Under the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, Massachusetts split its land-grant proceeds, one-third to MIT and two-thirds to the Massachusetts Agricultural College, now UMass Amherst.
Q 06How many times, at least, did Harvard try to absorb MIT?
Six
Six times, at least, Harvard tried to absorb MIT; a 1904 merger and move to Allston was approved before the state's highest court blocked the sale of MIT's Back Bay land in 1905.
Q 07The anonymous donor 'Mr Smith' behind the new riverside campus was revealed in 1920 to be whom?
George Eastman
George Eastman, the Kodak founder, gave anonymously as 'Mr Smith' from 1912 and was unmasked in 1920; MIT's charter crossed the Charles on a ceremonial barge called the Bucentaur.
Q 08MIT moved from Boston to its present campus across the Charles in which year?
1916
MIT crossed the Charles in 1916, marking the move with a three-day celebration; the neoclassical 'New Technology' campus was designed by William Welles Bosworth.
Q 09What structural material did Bosworth use for MIT's Maclaurin buildings and Great Dome?
reinforced concrete
Bosworth built the Maclaurin buildings of reinforced concrete, then mostly a factory material, behind limestone-clad classical facades topped by the Pantheon-like Great Dome.
Q 10Which physicist, MIT president from 1930, reorganised it into schools and pushed basic science?
Karl Compton
Karl Compton, president 1930-48, made Vannevar Bush his dean of engineering, split MIT into schools of science and engineering in 1932, and got it into the Association of American Universities in 1934.
Q 11The wartime 'Radiation Laboratory' at MIT was a cover name for work on what?
microwave radar
The Rad Lab developed microwave radar, its bland name suggesting nuclear physics instead; it grew from about 30 staff to nearly 4,000 and rivalled the Manhattan Project in scale.
Q 12By the end of World War II, MIT had received roughly how much in government R&D contracts?
$117 million
MIT's wartime R&D contracts came to roughly $117 million, more than any other university, most of it channelled through the Office of Scientific Research and Development.
Q 13The famously ramshackle Building 20, thrown up for the Rad Lab, was designed to last how long?
only to the end of the war
Q 21The MIT Media Lab was founded in 1985 by former president Jerome Wiesner and whom?
Nicholas Negroponte
Nicholas Negroponte co-founded the Media Lab with Jerome Wiesner in 1985; its industry-sponsorship model helped lure tech firms to Kendall Square, and projects have included Lego Mindstorms and One Laptop per Child.
Q 22Which web pioneer founded the W3C at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science in 1994?
Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, founded the World Wide Web Consortium at the Laboratory for Computer Science in October 1994; the LCS merged with the AI Lab in 2003 to form CSAIL.
Q 23MIT OpenCourseWare, announced in 2001, set out to do what?
Building 20 was meant to stand only to the end of the war yet survived until 1998; designed in a single afternoon, it became a legendary incubator that later housed Noam Chomsky's linguistics department.
Q 14MIT's off-campus Lincoln Laboratory was created in 1951 to develop what for the Air Force?
a continental air-defence radar net
Lincoln Laboratory was set up to build a continental air-defence radar net; its SAGE system became the first large-scale computerised command-and-control network, and the lab sits at Hanscom Air Force Base in Lexington.
Q 15'Doc' Draper's MIT Instrumentation Laboratory built the computerised guidance for which space programme?
Apollo
The Instrumentation Laboratory built the Apollo Guidance Computer that flew the Moon missions; its Poseidon missile work drew Vietnam-era protests, and it was spun off as the independent Draper Laboratory in 1973.
Q 16The 4 March 1969 research stoppage at MIT against military science gave birth to which organisation?
the Union of Concerned Scientists
The 4 March 1969 stoppage launched the Union of Concerned Scientists; MIT afterwards ruled that on-campus research must be open and publishable, leaving classified work to Lincoln Lab.
Q 17Which main-memory technology did MIT's Whirlwind computer adopt in 1953?
magnetic cores
Jay Forrester's team replaced Whirlwind's unreliable storage tubes with magnetic cores in 1953, making the machine far faster and more dependable; Whirlwind was also among the first computers to run in real time.
Q 18MIT's hacker culture is traced to which student group, more interested in wiring than trains?
the Tech Model Railroad Club
MIT hacking grew out of the Tech Model Railroad Club, whose Signals and Power subcommittee popularised 'hack' for a clever technical feat; its members formed the nucleus of the MIT AI Laboratory, a birthplace of hacker culture.
Q 19Which MIT AI Lab programmer launched the GNU Project in 1983 and the Free Software Foundation in 1985?
Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman, then at the MIT AI Lab, announced GNU in September 1983 and founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985, reacting to colleagues leaving for commercial Lisp-machine spinoffs.
Q 20Which network authentication protocol was created for MIT's Project Athena?
Kerberos
Kerberos, built for Project Athena in the 1980s, lets users prove identity with tickets issued by a trusted server; the eight-year Athena partnership with IBM and DEC also produced the X Window System.
publish all course materials online free
MIT OpenCourseWare set out to publish all course materials online free; announced in April 2001, it opened a pilot site in 2002 and by late 2007 had posted some 1,800 courses, virtually the entire curriculum.
Q 24In 2018 MIT announced a billion-dollar college of computing named after which donor?
Stephen Schwarzman
Stephen Schwarzman, the Blackstone co-founder, gave $350 million toward the $1 billion MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, announced in October 2018 to weave AI research and teaching across the Institute.
Q 25Which phrase is the English rendering of MIT's Latin motto?
mind and hand
MIT's motto, mens et manus, means mind and hand, the Institute's ideal of pairing classroom theory with learning by doing; its seal shows a scholar with a book beside a craftsman at an anvil.
Q 26MIT's mascot, Tim the Beaver, was chosen in 1914 because beavers are what?
nature's engineers
Alumnus Lester Gardner proposed the beaver as nature's engineers at the Technology Club of New York's January 1914 dinner, praising its engineering skill and industry; President Richard Maclaurin accepted the mascot there.
Q 27By what number do MIT students refer to Electrical Engineering and Computer Science?
Course 6
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science is Course 6, with computer science alone numbered 6-3; Mechanical Engineering is Course 2 and Mathematics is Course 18.
Q 28The heavy MIT class ring worn by upperclass students and alumni is nicknamed what?
the Brass Rat
Students call the ring the Brass Rat because its bezel beaver looks rodent-like on a brass-coloured band; each class tweaks the design, and the profane initialism IHTFP sometimes sneaks in.
Q 29The four-week January term of optional classes and events between semesters is called what?
Independent Activities Period
The Independent Activities Period, or IAP, fills January in MIT's 4-1-4 calendar; its offerings have included the 6.270 autonomous robot design contest and the annual Mystery Hunt.
Q 30What is the long hallway through MIT's original buildings, starting at Lobby 7, called?
the Infinite Corridor
Students call it the Infinite Corridor: it runs about 250 metres from Lobby 7 through the Maclaurin buildings, linking the east and west sides of campus under one roof.