Shakuntala Devi
Born on 4th Nov, 1939 in Bangalore, India.
Come from poor family background. At an age of 3 only she started showing her calculation power while she was doing card tricks.
At the age of 6 she demonstrated her calculation and memorization abilities at the University of Mysore.
Proved to be so good with numbers, that her father left the circus and took her on road shows that displayed her amazing ability at number crunching.
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Life and works:
1977 At university of USA she was asked to give mentally the 23rd root of (“9167486769200391580986609275853801624831066801443086 224071265164279346570408670965932792057674808067900227 830163549248523803357453169351119035965775473400756818 688305 620821016129132845564895780158806771 ”)
Which has 201 digits. She answered it correctly with in 50 seconds which was 12 seconds faster than the UNIVAC 1108 computer which took 62 seconds to answer.
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 answered the question in 28 seconds.
Books and Works:
She is the author of the following books
- Puzzles to Puzzle You
- More Puzzles to Puzzle You
- Book of Numbers
- Figuring: The Joy of Numbers.
- In the Wonderland of Numbers.
- Super Memory: It Can Be Yours.
- Mathability: Awaken the Math Genius in Your Child.
- Astrology for You.
In 1977, she wrote The World of Homosexuals, the first published academic study of homosexuality in India.
Known to be a “human computer” because of her great computational power and also she is a great Indian mathematician.
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