How Well Do You Know Your Scientists? Take a Fun Quiz to Find Out!

If you get more than five of these right, consider yourself a major science geek. Answers are at the end of this article.

1. What did Albert Einstein earn the Nobel prize for?

a. writing the equation for why the sky looks blue
b. discovering the existence of black holes
c. proving E=mc²
d. explaining the photovoltaic effect
e. explaining Brownian motion

2. Which of these scientists was involved in inventing the atomic bomb?

a. Enrico Fermi
b. Nikola Tesla
c. Stephen Hawking
d. Isaac Asimov
e. Albert Einstein

3. What did Marie Curie die of?

a. old age
b. food poisoning
c. the plague
d. tuberculosis
e. radiation poisoning

4. Who was the first woman scientist to receive a Nobel prize?

a. Beatrix Potter
b. Marie Curie
c. Florence Nightingale
d. Rachel Carson
e. Jane Goodall

5. Which scientist first proposed that the Earth and other planets move around the Sun instead of everything revolving around the Earth?

a. Galileo
b. Aristotle
c. Nicholas Copernicus
d. Isaac Newton
e. Johannes Kepler

6. Who helped popularize science for the general public?

a. Stephen Hawking
b. Isaac Asimov
c. Carl Sagan
d. Bill Nye
e. Richard Feynman

7. Which scientist invented radio?

a. Guglielmo Marconi
b. Neils Bohr
c. Alessandro Volta
d. Max Planck
e. Nikola Tesla

8. Who came up with calculus?

a. Isaac Newton
b. Euler
c. Euclid
d. Renee Descartes
e. Gottfried Leibniz

9. Which scientist is credited with the principal that explains how airplane wings create lift?

a. Charles Darwin
b. Daniel Bernoulli
c. James Clerk Maxwell
d. Lord Kelvin
e. Pascal

10. Who said, "Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration?"

a. Michael Faraday
b. Robert Oppenheimer
c. Benjamin Franklin
d. Albert Einstein
e. Thomas Edison

11. Who was in charge of laying the first successful transatlantic cable?

a. Lord Kelvin
b. Stephen Hawking
c. Alexander Muller
d. Edwin Drake
e. John Daniell

12. After which scientist is the unit of electric current named?

a. Alessandro Volta
b. Luigi Galvani
c. Andre Ampere
d. James Joule
e. James Watt

13. Who is known for the temperature scale he developed?