Shakuntala Devi
The "Hindu Mathematical Wizardess"
Born in 1939 in Bangalore, India to a lion tamer father, Shakuntala Devi started her relationship with numbers through card tricks she played with her father at the age of three.
Nicknamed the "Human Computer," and "Hindu Mathematical Wizardess" Devi demonstrated her mathematics abilities at the University of Mysore and Annamalai University as a child.
Her talent has been mentioned in the Guinness Book of World records several times, such as when she extracted the 23rd root of a 201-digit number mentally and when she found the cube root of 332,812,557 in seconds.
In 2006, she published " In the wonderland of numbers " a story about a girl fascinated with digits.
Shakuntala Devi passed away in the city on Sunday morning ( 21-4-2013). The 80-year-old genius was undergoing treatment for respiratory and cardiac problems for the past fortnight in a hospital at Basavanagudi in the Bangaluru city.
R. I. P
ReplyDeletei attended one of her sessions during my student days when she visited Stanford University. It was amazing to see her mentally calculate cube roots of really huge numbers!