A tribute to Shakuntala Devi, India’s Human Computer

Monday, September 14, 2015

Shakuntala Devi was born in 1929 to a poor family in Bangalore. She dropped out of school because her father could not afford the school fee. Her father, a circus worker, was the first one to recognise her mathematical abilities when she was just 3 years old. He realised this when he kept losing to Shakuntala in the game of cards. So, he did some investigation to check on his daughter if there was some foul play. Soon he realised that Shakuntala would just memorize the cards and their sequence! Here are some brilliant instances from Shakuntala Devi’s life which gave her the name of A HUMAN COMPUTER:

• Shakuntala Devi became a child prodigy when she was just 6 years old. Her talent could not be kept hidden for long and soon she was recognised as a mathematical genius. The first time she showed her calculation skills in public was at the University of Mysore at the age of 6!

• In 1977, Shakuntala extracted the 23rd root of a 201 digit number in just 50 seconds and she beat a Univac computer that had taken a little over a minute to do the same!

• She multiplied two 13 digit numbers (7,686,369,774,870 × 2,465,099,745,779) which were picked randomly; yet gave the right answer (18,947,668,177,995,426,462,773,730) in JUST 28 SECONDS! This incident was reported in The Guinness Book of World Records in 1982.

• She was known as the Human Computer not just because of these brilliant calculations, but also because she could tell you the day of the week for any given date from the last century, instantly!

• In 1988, Shakuntala travelled to US and was given a couple of mathematical problems. One of them was to tell the cube root of 61,629,875 and 7th root of 170,859,375. Arthur Jensen, a professor of psychology at that time had stated that Shakuntala gave the right answer to the questions before he was even done writing them in his notebook!

She passed away in April, 2013 but will always be remembered for the great work she did. She wrote books and novels about tips to make mathematical calculations easier for students. Shakuntala Devi was a great novelist, cookbook writer and a successful astrologer! Aren’t you all wondering “How did she do it?!”