Google celebrates Shakuntala Devi’s 84th Birthday through its Doodle
Mathematical genius, popularly known as the “
Shakuntala Devi was born to an orthodox Kannada Brahmin family on November 4, 1929, Bangalore, India as a child prodigy. When shakuntala Devi was 3 years old, while teaching a card trick, her father discovered her ability to memorize numbers. By age six she demonstrated her calculation and memorization abilities at the University of Mysore which was her first major public performance. She was able to do all this without any formal education !
Shakuntala Devi has traveled the world demonstrating her arithmetic talents, including a tour of Europe in 1950 and a performance in New York in 1976. In 1977, Devi competed with a computer in USA to give the cube root of 188132517 which she won ! In the same year at Southern Methodist University she extracted the 23rd root of a 201-digit number mentally just under 50 seconds. 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. Her talents earned her a place in the 1982 edition of The Guinness Book of World Records.
She has authored numerous books and the list includes :
- Puzzles to Puzzle You
- More Puzzles to Puzzle You
- Book of Numbers
- Perfect Murder
- The World of Homosexuals
- Figuring: The Joy of Numbers
- In the Wonderland of Numbers
- Super Memory: It Can Be Yours
- Mathability: Awaken the Math Genius in Your Child
- Astrology for You
Suffering from complications of the heart and kidneys Shakuntala Devi passed away on April 21, 2013 at a private hospital in Bangalore. She was 83 years old !