Women in STEM Trivia
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58 free Women in STEM trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
52 free Women in STEM trivia questions with answers. Women have discovered elements, written the first computer program, found the first pulsar and mapped the code of life, often without the credit. This quiz covers 30 of them: Marie Curie's two Nobels, Ada Lovelace's Note G, Katherine Johnson's checks for John Glenn, Rosalind Franklin's Photo 51, Grace Hopper's moth, Hedy Lamarr's frequency hopping, Mae Jemison and Sally Ride, Lise Meitner and Jocelyn Bell Burnell's missing Nobels, Jane Goodall's chimpanzees, Maryam Mirzakhani's Fields Medal and recent laureates from Doudna to Kariko. Easy questions cover the first woman in space and the book Silent Spring. The hard ones want the toy that started Goodall's career, the number of orbits Tereshkova flew and the sequence Lovelace's program computed. It works for a classroom, a Women's History Month event or a pub quiz round. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's biographies, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Marie Curie is the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in which two different sciences?
Physics and chemistry
Physics and chemistry: the 1903 physics committee at first meant to honour only Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel, adding Marie after Pierre asked to be considered with her; in 1911 she won the chemistry prize alone.
Q 02Which two elements did Marie Curie discover?
Radium and polonium
Radium and polonium: she and Pierre Curie announced polonium in July 1898, naming it for her native Poland, and radium in December 1898.
Q 03What word did Marie Curie coin for the phenomenon she studied?
Radioactivity
Radioactivity: Marie Curie coined the term in 1898 while studying the rays uranium emits, proposing that the emission was a property of the atom itself.
Q 04What did Marie Curie organise for French field hospitals during World War I?
Mobile X-ray units
Mobile X-ray units: Curie fitted vans with radiography equipment, nicknamed 'petites Curies', and drove them to the front so surgeons could locate bullets and shrapnel in wounded soldiers.
Q 05Ada Lovelace was the daughter of which famous poet?
Lord Byron
Lord Byron: the poet separated from Ada's mother Annabella weeks after her birth in December 1815 and left England for good; Annabella steered Ada toward mathematics.
Q 06Ada Lovelace's famous notes described a program for which proposed machine?
Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine
Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine: Lovelace translated Luigi Menabrea's 1842 paper on the proposed machine and added notes roughly three times longer than the original, including her famous Note G.
Q 07Which mathematical sequence did Ada Lovelace's Note G show how to compute?
Bernoulli numbers
Bernoulli numbers: Note G laid out a stepwise table for Babbage's proposed engine to calculate them, but the machine was never built, so the program never ran.
Q 08Which astronaut asked Katherine Johnson to recheck the computer's calculations before his 1962 orbital flight?
John Glenn
John Glenn: before his Friendship 7 flight in February 1962 he asked for Johnson to check the IBM computer's orbital figures by hand; she had earlier computed Alan Shepard's 1961 trajectory.
Q 09Which actress played Katherine Johnson in Hidden Figures?
Taraji P. Henson
Taraji P. Henson played Katherine Johnson, and at the 2017 Oscars she introduced the real Johnson, aged 98, who was wheeled on stage to a standing ovation.
Q 10Rosalind Franklin's most famous X-ray image of DNA is known as what?
Photo 51
Photo 51: the X-ray diffraction image of B-form DNA taken in May 1952 by her student Raymond Gosling, which Maurice Wilkins showed James Watson in early 1953 without her knowledge.
Q 11Rosalind Franklin earned her 1945 PhD for research on which material?
Coal
Coal: rather than take traditional war work in 1942, Franklin joined Britain's coal research association, where her study of coal's tiny pores helped predict how different coals would perform as fuel.
Q 12Grace Hopper's work laid the foundations for which English-based programming language, created in 1959?
COBOL
COBOL: the 1959 committee that defined it, with Hopper as adviser, drew heavily on FLOW-MATIC, the English-word language she had built for UNIVAC because business users were not mathematicians.
Q 13What did Grace Hopper's team famously find stuck in a relay of the Harvard Mark II in 1947?
A moth
Q 21How did Emmy Noether lecture at Gottingen when the faculty refused to appoint a woman?
Under David Hilbert's name
Under David Hilbert's name: from 1915 her courses were advertised as his, with Noether listed as merely assisting; she was allowed to teach under her own name only in 1919, and still without pay.
Q 22Chien-Shiung Wu's famous experiment proved that what is not conserved?
Parity
Parity: Wu's 1956 cobalt-60 beta-decay experiment showed the weak interaction distinguishes left from right; Lee and Yang, who proposed the test, won the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Q 23Chien-Shiung Wu worked on which wartime effort, separating uranium isotopes?
The Manhattan Project
A moth: on 9 September 1947 operators taped it into the Mark II logbook as the 'first actual case of bug being found', a joke that worked because engineers had called faults bugs since the 1800s.
Q 14What rank did Grace Hopper reach in the US Navy?
Rear admiral
Rear admiral: promoted to commodore at a White House ceremony in 1983, she became an admiral in 1985 only because the Navy renamed that one-star rank, and retired the next year aged 79.
Q 15Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr co-invented a frequency-hopping guidance system with which composer?
George Antheil
George Antheil: the avant-garde composer of Ballet Mecanique worked out the synchronised hopping mechanism with Lamarr, borrowing the idea of a player-piano roll; their patent was granted in August 1942.
Q 16Hedy Lamarr's frequency-hopping patent was intended to guide what?
Torpedoes
Torpedoes: the 1942 'Secret Communication System' patent hopped a radio-guided torpedo's control signal across 88 frequencies so enemy ships could not jam it.
Q 17Mae Jemison became the first African-American woman in space in 1992 aboard which shuttle, then NASA's newest?
Endeavour
Endeavour: Jemison flew on STS-47 in September 1992 as a mission specialist; a trained physician, she had earlier served as a Peace Corps medical officer in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Q 18Jennifer Doudna shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with whom for CRISPR gene editing?
Emmanuelle Charpentier
Emmanuelle Charpentier: the French microbiologist and Doudna published the 2012 Science paper showing CRISPR-Cas9 could be programmed to cut DNA at chosen sites, and shared the 2020 prize.
Q 19Barbara McClintock won the 1983 Nobel Prize for discovering what in maize?
Transposons, or 'jumping genes'
Transposons, or 'jumping genes': McClintock showed that genetic elements in maize could move between chromosomes, changing kernel colour patterns; faced with scepticism, she stopped publishing the data in journals.
Q 20Emmy Noether's famous theorem links symmetry with what?
Conservation laws
Conservation laws: Noether's 1918 theorem shows every continuous symmetry of a physical system yields a conserved quantity, so symmetry under time shifts gives conservation of energy.
The Manhattan Project: Wu joined its Columbia laboratory in 1944 to work on gaseous diffusion, and when the new Hanford reactor kept shutting down, her earlier research helped pin the blame on xenon-135.
Q 24In which national park did Jane Goodall begin her landmark study of wild chimpanzees in 1960?
Gombe Stream, Tanzania
Gombe Stream, Tanzania: Goodall arrived in July 1960 and that year watched chimps feed grass stalks into termite mounds to fish out insects, upending the belief that only humans made tools.
Q 25What was the name of the toy chimpanzee Jane Goodall's father gave her as a child?
Jubilee
Jubilee: her father gave her the stuffed chimpanzee when she was a toddler; it became her favourite toy, and Goodall still had it more than 60 years later.
Q 26Vera Rubin's studies of galaxy rotation curves provided key evidence for what?
Dark matter
Dark matter: Rubin and Kent Ford found that stars at a galaxy's edge orbit as fast as those near its centre, implying unseen mass; the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is named for her.
Q 27Lise Meitner was instrumental in discovering nuclear fission but was left out of which honour?
The 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
The 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went solely to Otto Hahn for discovering fission, although Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch had worked out the physics of what Hahn's experiments showed.
Q 28Lise Meitner fled Nazi Germany in 1938 and settled in which country?
Sweden
Sweden: she was slipped across the Dutch border in July 1938 and went on to Stockholm; that Christmas she and her nephew Otto Frisch worked out that the uranium nucleus had split.
Q 29Who was the first woman to win the Fields Medal, in 2014?
Maryam Mirzakhani
Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian-born Stanford professor, worked by doodling on huge sheets of paper, which her young daughter called painting; she died of breast cancer in 2017, aged 40.
Q 30Who was the first woman in space?
Valentina Tereshkova
Valentina Tereshkova spent almost three days in orbit on Vostok 6 in June 1963; her hobby of skydiving at a local flying club helped make her one of five women picked from some 400 candidates.