Shakuntala Devi
Tribute to the late great mathematical prodigy Shakuntala Devi
Shakuntala Devi
(born November 4, 1929 – died April 21, 2013), popularly known as “Human Computer”, was an Indian prodigy mental calculator.
Biography
Shakuntala Devi was born in Bangalore, India, to an orthodox priestly family. Her father rebelled against becoming a temple priest and instead joined a circus, where he worked as a trapeze and tightrope performer, and later as a lion tamer and a human cannonball. Shakuntala Devi was only around three years old and she was roped in to help her father with card tricks. Her father left the circus and took her on road shows that displayed her amazing ability at number crunching. It is worth noting that she was able to do this, despite having had no formal education. By age six she demonstrated her calculation and memorization abilities at the University of Mysore. At the age of eight she had success at Annamalai University by doing the same. In 2006 she released In the Wonderland of Numbers which talks about a girl Neha and her fascination for numbers. She developed the concept of ‘mind dynamics’.
Shakuntala Devi returned to India in the mid-1960’s and married Paritosh Banerji, a senior IAS officer from Kolkata. The couple had a daughter, Anupama Banerji. Shakuntala Devi returned to Bangalore in early 1980’s.
Achievements
- In 1977 in USA she competed with a computer to see who gives the cube root of 188138517 faster, she won. At the Southern Methodist University she was asked to give the 23rd root of a 201-digit number; she answered in 50 seconds. Her answer—546,372,891—was confirmed by calculations done at the U.S. Bureau of Standards by the Univac 1101 computer, for which a special program had to be written to perform such a large calculation.
- On June 18, 1980, she demonstrated the multiplication of two 13-digit numbers 7,686,369,774,870 x 2,465,099,745,779 picked at random by the Computer Department of Imperial College, London. She correctly answered 18,947,668,177,995,426,462,773,730 in 28 seconds. This event is mentioned in the 1982 Guinness Book of Records.
Death
On April 21, 2013 at around 8:15 am, Shakuntala Devi died at a hospital in Bangalore, India. She had been admitted to the Bangalore hospital on April 3 as her kidneys had become weak and she also had respiratory problems. She was 83 years old and is survived by a daughter, Anupama Banerji.
