Mathematical genius Shakuntala Devi, known for her wizardry with numbers, died on Sunday following a heart attack. She was 73.
Shakuntala, who had mastered mental arithmetics was also keenly involved in astrology, earned the sobriquet of ‘human computer’ after she went up against sophisticated computers in the late 1960s and 1970s. She is well remembered for her performance at the Imperial College of London on June 18, 1980, when she demonstrated the multiplication of two 13-digit numbers (7,686,369,774,870 x 2,465,099,745,779) picked randomly by a computer. Shakuntala took only 28 seconds to answer. Her feat found mention in the Guinness Book of Records in 1995. Shakuntala Devi is also remembered for mentally extracting the 23rd root of a 201-digit number.
Shakuntala Devi is also remembered for mentally extracting the 23rd root of a 201-digit number. She was able to achieve this 12 seconds faster than the Univac-1108 computer.
However, she never quite liked to be called the ‘human computer’. “I’m more human than a computer”, she had told The Jakarta Post in an interview in 2010.
“I haven’t had any formal education. By the grace of God, I am gifted in mathematics and English language. Without mathematics, there’s nothing you can do. Everything around you is mathematics. Everything around you is numbers”, she had said.
She was born on November 4, 1939, in a humble family in Bangalore. Devi’s father was a circus performer. It was while she was playing cards with her father at the tender age of three that he found his daughter’s calculation abilities. It turned out that she beat him not by the sleight of hand, but by memorising the cards.
At the age of six, she demonstrated her calculation skills in her first major public performance at the University of Mysore and two years later, she proved herself successful as a child prodigy at Annamalai University. She has written a number of books like ‘Fun with Numbers’, ‘Astrology for You’, ‘Puzzles to Puzzle You’, and ‘Mathablit’ and a work on homosexuality.
Shakuntala’s last rites were performed around 4 pm at the Banashankari crematorium.