In 2020, a Bollywood bio-film starring Vidya Balan was released on an OTT platform garnering praises from critics. The movie was on the life of an Indian mathematician Shakuntala Devi; also known as the "human computer".
Shakuntala was born on November 4, 1929 in the Southern Indian city of Bangalore. Her father used to work at a circus company. Shakuntala was mere 3 years old when her father discovered that she had an amazing ability to memorize numbers. The father decided to quit his job and started giving road shows projecting the talent of his daughter in calculating.
At the age of five, the world started realizing her proficiency in highly complex mental arithmetic. Her passion to expand the human capacity made her develop the concept known as ‘Mind Dynamics’.
Guinness Book of World Records
Her talents earned her a place in the Guinness Book of World Records in the year 1982.
At the age of six, Shakuntala Devi proved her arithmetic capabilities in the University of Mysore. She then moved to London with her father in 1944.
Word Tour
To display her astonishing talent, Shakuntala was on a tour of Europe throughout 1950 and was in New York City in 1976.
California University's Psychology Professor observed her skills
In 1988, she travelled to the US, there Arthur Jensen, a professor of educational psychology at the University of California, Berkeley tested her performance at several tasks, including the calculation of large numbers.
Examples of the problems presented to Devi included calculating the cube root of 61,629,875 and the seventh root of 170,859,375.
Jensen reported that Devi provided the solution to the above-mentioned problems (395 and 15, respectively) before Jensen could copy them down in his notebook. Jensen published his findings in the academic journal Intelligence in 1990.
Faster than Computer
In 1977, at Southern Methodist University, she gave the 23rd root of a 201-digit number in 50 seconds. Her answer, which was 546,372,891, was confirmed by calculations done at the US Bureau of Standards by the UNIVAC 1101 computer, for which a special program had to be written to perform such a large calculation, which took a longer time than for her to do the same.
Given the title of ‘Human Computer’
She was termed as ‘Human Computer’ after she projected her talents in a BBC's show on October 5, 1950.
Although she was given with the title of ‘Human Computer’. She never liked this title. She said, human mind has incomparably much capabilities than the computer and it is not appropriate to compare human mind with computers.
