Question 1

Imagine putting together the following team to create the greatest movie ever: 

• The French illustrator Moebius and the Swiss artist HR Giger - diligently working on the pre-production storyboard (Giger would go on to create the titular alien in Alien a few years later) 

• Salvador Dali in his first acting role would have shared screen time with Orson Welles

• Pink Floyd would have composed the soundtrack

Sadly, the director was never able to realise his vision (the script would have resulted in a 14-hour-long movie and it ran way over budget even in pre-production). But his influence changed movie-making forever. 

Identify the movie and for bonus points the director. 

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Answer: 

Dune by Alejandro Jodorowsky

The documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune (2014) - about the director’s phenomenal undertaking in the 70s is worth a watch. 

Question 2

In the world of tech, when we can’t solve certain problems and leave them as is, we jokingly say - “it’s not a bug, it is a feature”. Renaissance artists and sculptors - a prolific but easily distracted and sometimes lazy bunch - would leave so many works incomplete that they came up with a new name for this “technique” - non finito. 

Da Vinci, a notoriously brilliant slacker, abandoned a bunch of projects. The most famous of these is the Adoration of the Magi. After working on it for a year he took on the commission for the Last Supper. 

The Adoration of the Magi was recommissioned and repainted by another Italian painter. Both versions are still on display in Florence at the Uffizi. Identify this apprentice and later assistant and collaborator of Botticelli. 

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Answer: 

Filippino Lippi

Question 3

Standing at 330 metres, this hotel in the country's capital city began construction in 1987 and is the tallest building in the country. But major turmoil caused by the fall of the Soviet Union to this country’s economy resulted in the work getting suspended. 

Egyptian investors later allowed for the installation of windows and the completion of the building’s exterior. The opening of the hotel has been announced multiple times over the years, but the hotel is still not open to the public. 

Identify this capital city. 

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Answer: 

Pyongyang - the capital of North Korea; this is the Ryugyong Hotel

Question 4

In the margins of a copy of Diophantus’s Arithmetica, the French mathematician Pierre de Fermat wrote down a proposition for a theorem around the year 1637. He added that he had a proof for this theorem but it was too large to fit the margin. Now Fermat was brilliant and many other statements claimed by him were subsequently proven to be true and credited as theorems to him. But it took a further 358 years of effort by mathematicians to finally prove what has come to be known as Fermat’s Last Theorem. 

While Fermat’s theorem is generalised for any integer of value greater than 2, all of us were subjected to a specific case of it where the value is 2 - throughout middle and high school. Which theorem or equation?

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Answer: 

Pythagoras’s Theorem

In number theory, Fermat's Last Theorem states that no three positive integers a, b, and c satisfy the equation aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ for any integer value of n greater than 2. The cases n = 1 and n = 2 have been known since antiquity to have infinitely many solutions. The case n = 2 is what we know as the Pythagorean theorem (and a, b and c are then called Pythagorean triples). 

The first successful proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem was released in 1994 by Andrew Wiles and formally published in 1995. It was described as a "stunning advance" in the citation for Wiles's Abel Prize award in 2016.