Shakuntala Devi the Legend:

Shakuntala Devi born in 4-November-1929 and died on 21-April-2013 was a multitasking woman. She had hobbies like she was author, an astrologer and a great mathematician or you can say, mental calculator popularly known as Human-Computer. Shakuntala Devi strove to simplify numerical calculations for students. Her talent earned her a place in the 1982 edition The Guinness Book Of World Records. However, the certificate for the record was given posthumously on 30 July 2020, despite Devi achieving her world record on 18 June 1980 at Imperial College, London. Devi was a precocious child and she demonstrated her arithmetic abilities at the University of Mysore without any formal education. Shakuntala Devi wrote some of her books in her later years including novels, puzzles, and Astrology. She wrote a book named The world of Homosexuals which is considered as the first study of homosexuality in India. She saw homosexuality in a positive light and is considered a pioneer in the field.

Early Life: 

Shakuntala Devi was born in Bangalore, Karnataka to a Kannada Brahmin family. Her father worked as a trapeze artist, lion tamer, tightrope walker, and magician in a circus. He discovered his daughter's ability to memorize numbers while teaching her a card trick when she was about three years old. Her father left the circus and took her on road shows that displayed her ability at calculation. She did this without any formal education. At the age of six, she demonstrated her arithmetic abilities at the University of Mysore.
In 1944, Devi moved to London with her father.

Mental Calculation 

Devi traveled to several countries around the world demonstrating her arithmetic talents. She was on a tour of Europe throughout 1950 and was in New York City in 1976. In 1988, she traveled to the US to have her abilities studied by Arthur Jensen, a professor of educational psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Jensen 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.
In 1977, at Southern Methodist University, she gave the 23rd root of a 201-digit number in 50 seconds. Her answer 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. On 18 June 1980, she demonstrated the multiplication of two 13-digit numbers — 7,686,369,774,870 × 2,465,099,745,779. These numbers were picked at random by the Department of Computing at Imperial College London. She correctly answered 18,947,668,177,995,426,462,773,730 in 28 seconds, which was the time taken by her to speak the answer. This event was recorded in the 1982 Guinness Book of Records. Writer Steven Smith commented, "the result is so far superior to anything previously reported that it can only be described as unbelievable." In a 2009 interview, Devi recalled Indira Gandhi telling her "Shakuntala, remember I've got so many ambassadors all over the world but you're a very special ambassador because you're a roving ambassador, a mathematical ambassador, who can win friends for India and build up a close relationship between country to country." Shakuntala Devi explained many of the methods she used to do mental calculations in her book Figuring: The Joy of Numbers, which is still in print.

The above photo is of Shakuntala Devi 

When was Shakuntala Devi born ?

Shakuntala Devi died on the date of 4-November-1929.

Who is Shakuntala Devi?

Shakuntala Devi was an author, astrologer, and a great mathematician.