Science prompt
Name a famous mathematician — Best Krillion Answers
Facing “Name a famous mathematician” in a dive? Here is how to think rare: the best picks, the safe backups, and the crowd defaults to avoid. Every answer below is real and valid — rarity decides the tier.
Best rare pick: Srinivasa Ramanujan — specific, valid, and uncommon enough for Deep Cut or better.
Avoid (Plankton): Fibonacci, Rene Descartes — correct, but the crowd's first thought.
One in a Krillion — 100 pts
The rarest valid answers — maximum depth.
Srinivasa Ramanujan · Emmy Noether
Deep Cut — 85 pts
Extremely rare picks most players miss.
Alan Turing · John von Neumann
Rare — 60 pts
Genuinely uncommon — strong scoring.
Leonhard Euler · Carl Friedrich Gauss
Schooler — 30 pts
Known but not top-of-mind.
Euclid · Archimedes
Too Clever — 15 pts
A bit too obvious.
Pythagoras · Isaac Newton
Plankton — 10 pts
The crowd's default — avoid these.
Fibonacci · Rene Descartes
How to play this prompt
Strategy notes specific to “Name a famous mathematician” — not generic advice.
Most players know the famous examples. The depth is in the specific names, elements, and phenomena beyond the textbook highlights.
The winning instinct on this one: skip your first thought entirely and type your second. Srinivasa Ramanujan is a perfect example — completely valid, just not the reflex answer. Alan Turing plays the same role as a backup.
Watch out for Fibonacci. It's valid, but validity isn't the game — rarity is. Rene Descartes has the same problem: everyone knows it, so everyone types it, so it scores like everyone.
Leonhard Euler and Archimedes are the honest middle of this prompt — answers most players know but few type first. If your instinct answer feels too easy, reach for this layer instead of the obvious.
Rare answers travel in packs: if John von Neumann comes to mind, Carl Friedrich Gauss and Alan Turing are usually one thought away. Train yourself to pull the whole cluster, not just the first name that surfaces.
Rated 4/5 difficulty — only 12 banked answers, so matching the bank is genuinely hard. Precision matters more than speed here.
Related prompts
More Science prompts to train on — same rarity thinking, new answers.