Can you name the first names of the given mathematicians?

Surname	First name	Nationality
Russell		British
Abel		Norwegian
Newton		British
Weil		French
Curry		American
d'Alembert		French
Poisson		French
Lagrange		French/Prussian
Eisenstein		German
Cauchy		French
Hardy		British
Kronecker		German
Banach		Polish
Hermite		French
Heaviside		British
Fibonacci		Italian
Wiles		British
Poincaré		French
Sierpinski		Polish
Stieltjes		Dutch
Klein		German
Kolmogorov		Russian
Frege		German
Chebyshev		Russian
Leibniz		German

Surname	First name	Nationality
Pascal		French
Grothendieck		German/French
Peano		Italian
Cayley		British
Dirichlet		German
Cantor		German
Turing		British
Galois		French
von Neumann		American/Hungarian
Lie		Norwegian
Legendre		French
Hilbert		German
Ramanujan		Indian
Mersenne		French
Gödel		Austrian/American
Mertens		German
de Fermat		French
Erdős		Hungarian
Euler		Swiss
Mandelbrot		Polish/French
Descartes		French
Gauss		German
Minkowski		German
Laplace		French
Dedekind		German

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Mathematicians' First Names Quiz

by Ignis_Umbrae

Created Nov 20, 2010 in Science
Featured Nov 28, 2010
Game Plays 21,952

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Archived comments: show them

	fluffy:	Nov 28th, 2010 at 04:18 GMT	19 points
	He was a little on the Heaviside.

	TJL:	Nov 28th, 2010 at 04:56 GMT	-1 points
	We should have to answer in order; this just leads to guessing random names

	TJL:	Nov 28th, 2010 at 05:04 GMT	14 points
	Never mind. Mathematicians have much stranger names than the general population. Some mathematician should analyze the standard deviation of them...

	NY_MOB:	Nov 28th, 2010 at 05:51 GMT	3 points
	I know the names of so few mathematicians - and John Nash wasn't on the list. I did resort to guessing names but as TJL pointed out, many of these math guys have pretty uncommon first names...

	quizzesarenice:	Nov 28th, 2010 at 05:54 GMT	5 points
	No women?

	wheatonbrando:	Nov 28th, 2010 at 05:55 GMT	4 points
	This is insanely hard. I just graduated with a math major 5 years ago and I knew 10 of them. Heck there are more mathmematicians I've never even heard of than ones whose first names I knew. Great quiz though, really interesting.

	ZapRowsdower:	Nov 28th, 2010 at 06:04 GMT	5 points
	Good times. Half "guess the name" (which is a common sporcle quiz type) and half good math trivia. Nice work!

	AStue:	Nov 28th, 2010 at 06:05 GMT	51 points
	Anyone else epic fail with "Albert" for Eisenstein?

	dxdtdemon:	Nov 28th, 2010 at 06:17 GMT	2 points
	How come some of the hyphenated names are on here, and some aren't, such as Simeon-Denis Poisson?

	WithShoes:	Nov 28th, 2010 at 06:25 GMT	-4 points
	Ah ****. I watched a movie about Benoit Mandelbrot in class, too.

	ony:	Nov 28th, 2010 at 10:18 GMT	0 points
	Living in Brno I must insist on Kurt Goedel being also Czechoslovakian citizen.

	nadivereb:	Nov 28th, 2010 at 10:39 GMT	0 points
	If you considered Paul Erdős as Hungarian, at least accept Pál, which is his real name.

	nadivereb:	Nov 28th, 2010 at 10:40 GMT	3 points
	I'm sorry, I was wrong. You accept it. But anyway, I think it should be the primary answer.

	Statto2:	Nov 28th, 2010 at 11:10 GMT	6 points
	When I think of Bertrand Russell I think first of a philosopher and pacifist - he was truly a polymath (no pun intended).

	isildur:	Nov 28th, 2010 at 11:59 GMT	0 points
	Got more by guessing random names than by actually knowing the answers. Sadly I did a final year project using programming language Haskell, named after Haskell Curry whose name I wasn't able to guess.

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	Jerdoggiedog:	Nov 28th, 2010 at 14:38 GMT	0 points
	No Bourbaki?

	wqlk3:	Nov 28th, 2010 at 16:20 GMT	0 points
	How many other people got Mandelbrot because of Jonathan Coulton's Mandelbrot Set song?

	Rayavi:	Nov 28th, 2010 at 16:45 GMT	-1 points
	I did indeed, wqlk3.

	jenb:	Nov 28th, 2010 at 17:23 GMT	2 points
	that WAS hard. I'm a math person and know most of these last names, but the first names that go with them... not so much. Only things like kronecker - oh, kronecker delta! What's the first name? No idea. or Legendre polynomials - first name...hmmm. Good one!

	cappy:	Nov 28th, 2010 at 18:39 GMT	8 points
	Sooooo, what's everybody's Erdos Number?

	marcel_B612:	Nov 28th, 2010 at 19:51 GMT	2 points
	For a few months last year I thought the Heavyside function was spelled "Heavyside" and referred to the "heavy side" i.e. the "positive" side of the continuum being given the value of 1. I think it's absurd that someone can graduate with a math degree and not have heard of pretty much every single one of these mathematicians (except maybe people like Mertens, who you wouldn't hear of outside of Number Theory, and at most three others). Knowing their first names, on the other hand, is a different story.

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	danielar:	Nov 28th, 2010 at 22:51 GMT	3 points
	no sophie germain?

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	NY_MOB:	Nov 29th, 2010 at 00:01 GMT	9 points
	Can we ban this guy with his persistant advertising?

	Alsadius:	Nov 29th, 2010 at 00:18 GMT	0 points
	Great quiz - doesn't make me feel stupid or bored, but still quite a challenge.

	ShadowGamer:	Nov 29th, 2010 at 01:17 GMT	0 points
	NY_MOB - He does that all the time in almost every sporcle published games.