New Delhi: Celebrating Shakuntala Devi's 84th birthday, Google today posted a doodle that features Shakuntala Devi and the 6 letters of Google written in the same style as digits on a calculator. But who was Shakuntala Devi?
Mathematical genius Shakuntala Devi, nicknamed as "human computer", was known for her ability to make complex mental calculations. She found a slot 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'. She had the ability to tell the day of the week of any given date in the last century in a jiffy. Coming from a humble family, Shakuntala Devi's father was a circus performer who did trapeze, tightrope and cannonball shows.
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 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, Devi did not lose her calculating ability when she turned adult like other prodigies such as Truman Henry Safford. In 1977, Devi extracted the 23rd root of a 201-digit number mentally.
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.
She died on April 21, 2013 at a hospital following respiratory problems. She was 83.
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