Math and Tech Quiz 2015by Naman Dhanuka

(namand@outlook.com)

Prelims

meh

• 20 questions in all

• No negative marking

• Star marked questions to serve as tie breakers

• Top 6 teams from here will qualify for the final

• Quiz master’s decision final and binding

*1. This law has often been illustrated using the example of fax machines:

A single fax machine is useless, but the value of every fax machine increases with the total number of fax machines in the network, because the total number of people with whom each user may send and receive documents increases.

Which is the law being talked about?

Metcalfe’s Law

2. Blanked out part?

Reality Distortion Field

3. ID the product.

Microsoft HoloLens

4. Born and raised in Iran, as a child she wanted to get into literature. The first time she enjoyed a beautiful solution (sic) was when her brother told her how Gauss worked out in seconds how to sum all the numbers from 1 to 100.

Which accomplished mathematician am I talking about?

Maryam Mirzakhani

5. The _______ problem is a major unsolved problem in computer science. Informally, it asks whether every problem whose solution can be quickly verified by a computer can also be quickly solved by a computer. It was essentially first mentioned in a 1956 letter written by Kurt Goodel to John von Neumann. FITB

P vs NP Problem

*6. X is a flower fly found only in Costa Rican forests. Another fly found in similar habitats was named Y; according to Chris Thompson, the describer of these species, both names were in "recognition of [their] great contributions to the science of Dipterology“.

Give me either X and Y or the people after whom X and Y were named.

Eristalis Gatesi and Eristali Alleni/ Bill Gates and Paul Allen

7. He was an English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement. Among his best-known works are the lengthy narrative poems Don Juan, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the short lyric She Walks in Beauty and his erudite daughter!

Name of his daughter?

Ada Lovelace

8. Connect

Golden Ratio

*9. What does this Google doodle depict?

Witch of Agnesi

10. Connect

Gawker Media

11. Connect

Phone sold online on select portals exclusively.

12. Identify the Indian IT giant.

Mindtree

13. Which company was earlier called Chinese Academy of Sciences Computer Technology Research Institute New Technology Development Company?

Lenovo

*14. This was invented by Ted Selker at PARC only because of the fact that it took 0.75 seconds to shift your hands from keyboard to the mouse. What?

TrackPoint/pointing stick/tracker

15. Author?

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn

16. Blanked out part?

Wheaton

17. What are these?

(5,11), (7,13), (11,17), (13,19), (17,23), (23,29), (31,37), (37,43)

Sexy Primes

*18. The number Y, was given by 9 year old X, nephew of the American mathematician Edward Kasner.ID X and Y.

X- Milton Sirotta

Y- Googol

19. ZipDial acquired by X for $45 million, lets users engage with a brand, celebrity or organisation by simply making a 'missed call' to a designated number. This was X's first acquisition in India.ID X.

Twitter

20. Name the only CEO to have featured on a Vogue magazine cover. Workable..

• Marrissa Mayer

FINALS

1. How to we better know the group of these companies?

UNIVAC

IBMS/Snow white and the Seven Dwarves

2. Specs of what?

• 5 inch (127 mm) 52-column display

• two floppy-disk drives

• a Z80 microprocessor

• 64k of RAM

• could fit under an airplane seat

• It could survive being accidentally dropped

• included a bundled software package that included the CP/M operating system, the BASIC programming language, the WordStar word processing package, and the SuperCalc spreadsheet program.

Osborne 1, first laptop ever.

3. Name the computer pioneer.

Alan Turing

4. What is being depicted here?

Mr. Hedelson invented the Segway and he fell off the cliff while riding a segway.

5. What made YouTube increase it’s view counter from 32 bit to 64 bit?

Gangnam Style views surpassed the 32 bit limit

6. “Exploding Kittens is a highly strategic kitty-powered version of Russian Roulette. Players take turns drawing cards until someone draws an exploding kitten and loses the game. The deck is made up of cards that let you avoid exploding by peeking at cards before you draw, forcing your opponent to draw multiple cards, or shuffling the deck.”

Exploding Kittens is a card game by which.. Company?

• TheOatmeal

7. From a 1995 “book of 101 Un-Useless Japenese Inventions” to making to the Best 25 inventions of 2014. What?

Hint: It has often been dubbed as the Wand of Narcissus

Selfie Stick

8. Coined by Nick Pelling, it is the use of game thinking and game mechanics in non game contexts to engage users in the said domain, what term?

Gamification

9. She has often been called the following:

• The most important person in advertising

• The mom of Google

• The most important Googler you’ve ever heard of

Who?

Susan Wojcicki

10. Bought over by Google in 2011, created by Tim and Nina as a way to collect and correlate ratings.

Itrates hotels, nightlife, shopping, zoos, music,movies, golf courses, and airlines. The guides are sold in book form, and formerly as a paid subscription on its web site. Which online guide?

Zagat

11. Connect

VULCAN INC

Paul Allen

12. Whose voice?

Steve Ballmer (developers, developers)

13. Patent of what?

Snapchat

14. “______ ______” is about understanding our users’ root problems and making the best product decisions to solve them. It’s not about tipping the scale towards one extreme end, but rather finding how to create the best day to day experience.

FITB.

Never Settle

15. What connects Facebook, Samsung, Ericsson, MediaTek, Microsoft, Opera Software, and Qualcomm?

Internet.org

16. Voice and name of the song he’s singing.

Richard Stallman, Free Software Song

17. The first known ____ was taken by Robert Cornelius in 1839 and recorded it as the “First light picture ever”. It’s a part of most people’s daily lives now.

FITB.

Selfie

18. Connect

John Nash

19. Born as Multitech International in 1976, the company changed its name to what we know it as today in 1987. The Latin word for “sharp, acute, able and facile”.

Which company?

Acer

20. What law/rule/principle?

90-9-1 Principle/ 1% rule

21. Name the phenomenon

Barbara Streisand Effect

22. “It was telling us how English was spoken, instead of reflecting how English was actually spoken.”

This thought lead to development of what in Peckham’s dorm room?

Urban Dictionary

23. ID the guy on right.

Bertrand Russel, it’s a scene from a 1967 Hindi movie “Aman”

24. Elements of whose vocab?

• Children were referred to as "epsilons"

• People who stopped doing mathematics had "died"

• Music (except classical music) was "noise"

• People who had married were "captured"

• People who had divorced were "liberated"

• To give a mathematical lecture was "to preach"

• To give an oral exam to a student was "to torture" him/her.

Paul Erdos

25. Personality

Konrad Zuse

26. Who discovered the constant e by studying a question about compound interest which required him to find the value of the following expression (which is in fact e) ?

• Eulor

27. Which ground-breaking algorithm was introduced by this book?

Descartes Rule of Signs, Rene Descartes

28. Whose suicide note?

George Eastman

29. Connect

Akamai

30. "A lot of people have been asking how I've stirred up so much publicity around the project, and my simple answer is: 'I have no idea‘” – Kyle McDonald

Explain the project he is talking about.

From “One Red Paperclip” to buying a house

** Significance of the song “Tom’s Diner” by Suzane Vega?

** Who authored the book Neuromancer?

**Who runs Mashable.com?