Shakuntala Devi, an Indian Mathematics Prodigy and well known as Human Computer, passed away today at a hospital in Bangalore. She was 83 years old. Doctors declared her dead at 8.15 AM. The reason for her death is said to be Respiratory Problems or Heart Attack.
A household name in India, Ms. Devi cast a spell adding a 16-digit number with another one and multiplying the result with an equal array of numbers almost instantaneously, finding the cube root of the resultant and pops up with an answer in just about the time taken for a wink.
Ms. Devi, who had no formal education and who simply picked up reading and writing, had the ingenous ability to tell the day of the week of any given date in the last century in a jiffy.
Rated as one in 58 million for her stupendous mathematical feats by one of the fastest super-computers ever invented —the Univac — 1108 —, Ms. Devi believed in using grey cells to silicon chips.
Born on November four, 1939, Devi figured in the Guiness Book of World Record for her outstanding ability and wrote numerous books like Fun with Numbers, Astrology for You, Puzzles to Puzzle You, and Mathablit.
Hailing from a simple orthodox Kannada Brahmin family, Ms. Devi’s father was a circus performer who did trapeze, tightrope and cannonball shows. He had rebelled against becoming a temple priest. Devi was also an astrologer and gave remedies purportedly based on date and time of birth.
It was while Ms. Devi 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 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 again proved herself successful as a child prodigy at Annamalai University.
However, despite apprehensions in some quarters, Ms. Devi did not lose her calculating ability when she turned adult like other prodigies such as Truman Henry Safford.
In January 1977, at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, SHAKUNTALA DEVI extracted the 23rd root of a “201-digit number” at 50-second mark, with the correct answer being ‘546372891’. UNIVAC (The fastest computer at that time) took 62 seconds and 13,000 instructions for the same!!!
On 18th June, 1980, Shakuntala Devi demonstrated the multiplication of two 13-digit numbers: ‘7,686,369,774,870 x 2,465,099,745,779’, picked randomly by the Computer Department of Imperial College, London. She produced the correct answer of ‘18,947,668,177,995,426,462,773,730’, in just 28 seconds.