Skip to content


The Friday Question: A prequel

I think I missed out last week’s question, my apologies. So here’s a simple teaser instead, while I work on the question for tomorrow.

Name the odd one out as well as what they have in common.

Niels Bohr. Pierre and Marie Curie. Albert Einstein. Enrico Fermi. Alfred Nobel. Ernest Rutherford.

Getting the odd one out correctly means nothing. You must answer both parts.

Posted in Four pillars .


19 Responses

Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. Joachim Stroh says

    Here’s my guess: Alfred Nobel. He established the Nobel Prizes; everyone else received them: Albert Einstein received his Nobel Prize in 1922, Ernest Rutherford was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Enrico Fermi in 1938, Niels Bohr in 1922 and Pierre and Marie Curie in 1903.

  2. DE says

    Well, one of them couldn’t win the Nobel prize :-)

  3. JP says

    Joachim, David, if only it were that simple.

  4. JP says

    Joachim, Dave, see amended question. That will help you get closer to the answer. My bad.

  5. Divya says

    Common:- All have an element named after them.
    Odd:- 1 didn’t win Nobel :)

  6. Ian Grant says

    All except Nobel won the Noble prize.

  7. Charles Oppenheimer says

    Alferd Nobel – they are all scientists, but he is the only non physicist, being a chemist?

  8. DE says

    And Divya, all synthetic (not natural)

  9. Joachim Stroh says

    ok, got it:
    bohrium– Niels Bohr
    curium– Pierre and Marie Curie
    einsteinium– Albert Einstein
    fermium– Enrico Fermi
    nobelium– Alfred Nobel
    rutherfordium (Rf, 104) – Ernest Rutherford

  10. Tales says

    All scientists, except Nobel

  11. Obiwan Kenobi says

    [Heavy Wikipedia research to follow]

    I figured almost immediately that they all have elements of the periodic table named after them, so that was a good candidate (apart from the obvious Nobel prize connection) for the common factor. The elements named after these stalwarts are:

    Curium 96
    Einsteinium 99
    Fermium 100
    Nobelium 102
    Rutherfordium 104
    Bohrium 107

    Initially I thought the odd one out is Rutherford, whose eponymous element was discovered almost simultaneously in the USA and the USSR. The Russians named it Kurchatovium, and it took a committee of the IUPAC to resolve the situation. All the other elements were “unanimous” choices. This was from what I remembered of my high-school Chemistry. But Wikipedia says there was a naming controversy about 107 as well, which was also resolved by an IUPAC committee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Element_naming_controversy), so I looked deeper.

    Eventually I have hit upon the real odd-one-out – the Curies. The element named after them, Curium, is the only one of the set that naturally occurs and is not a synthetic (ie, artificially created) element. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_element

  12. Jon Mountjoy says

    So apparently it’s elemental, dear Watson.

  13. JP says

    No one has quite got what I am looking for so far. You have all identified that the list of people have all had elements named after them. Nobel is a possible odd man out, given the others all won Nobel Prizes, but I could also argue that all are associated with Nobel Prizes. Similarly, while trace curium has been located in “natural” state, the element is normally synthesised, as are all the others.

    Some have suggested banknotes, but neither Fermi nor Nobel have appeared on banknotes. All have appeared on stamps and on coins.

    I am waiting for the distinctively different answer I set the question for. And it has not surfaced yet.

  14. Divya says

    Their investions lead to invetion of powerful explosives (nuclear bomb and dynamite) ,All but Alfred nobel was not involved in journey to nuclear bomb.
    Some hint pls, Is answer realted to science or I need to expenad my search area?

  15. Aaron says

    Rutherford is the only one that is right-handed

  16. Narayan says

    All of them except Alfred Nobel have won the Nobel prize and the common aspect of course is the elements named after each one of them.

    This was a tough one crack!

  17. Gwen Jenkins says

    Marie Curie is the only woman, but I suppose that’s too obvious. On the other hand, finding the odd one out was expected to be the easy part. So maybe it’s not so obvious to everybody… in which case, how geeky can you get?

  18. DE says

    Well, I have found another connection between all of them (with the exception of Marie Curie) – which I looked at in response to JP’s last sentence.

  19. DE says

    haha – it ended up that my guess about the connection was correct – which makes JP’s hint of “surface” (concious or unconcious?) very impressive.



Some HTML is OK

or, reply to this post via trackback.



%d bloggers like this: