Shakuntala Devi: Universalhuman supercomputer

ONE has to see her and have a meeting with her in order to realize the prowess of this woman. I was fortunate to do both. Once in the 1960s when I was a young editor in Aden, the British Colony then, and later on in the 1970s in Mumbai.
Shakuntala Devi, born in l939, was nothing short of a prodigy. And she admitted to me and to the audience that she did not know how she had those unbelievable powers of calculations or mathematics.
Shakuntala was still young when we met in Aden during a function organized by the Christian school, which had one of the largest halls in the then British Colony.
She mesmerized the audience by her extraordinary calculation skills. I tried to test her by asking what day of the week was April 9, l935 — my date of birth — and she immediately said it was Tuesday. My father confirmed it from his diary.
Others present unleashed a deluge of questions, which she answered correctly. Later on I met her in India where she had become a prodigy actually beating advanced computers that nobody on earth had done before. She had also become richer and older, much better looking than her present Internet photographs would suggest.
She accepted an invitation to attend a seminar at the world famous Imperial College in London. Those who had gone perhaps to mock stayed throughout the session speechless and wonderstruck.
Famous for its mathematics courses from bachelors to doctoral degrees, the college professors asked her to provide the multiplication of two 13-digit numbers randomly picked up by the computer that is 7,686,369,774,870 by 2,465,099,745,779. She gave the correct answer in just 28 seconds without using any calculator.
Belonging to a humble family, Shakuntala’s father was employed as a trapeze and tightrope performer and later on, as a human cannonball in a circus. It was while she was playing cards with her father at the age of three that he discovered that his daughter is a calculating genius. It turned out that she beat him not by sleight of hand, but by memorizing the cards.
When Shakuntala was six years old, she demonstrated her calculation skills at the University of Mysore. And by the time, she was eight years old she again proved herself successful at Annamalai University by doing the same. However, despite apprehensions from some quarters, Shakuntala did not lose her calculating ability with the setting in of adulthood like other prodigies such as Truman Henry Safford.
According to her biography she met acknowledged genius the famous Albert Einstein. He tested her and was as enthralled as everybody else but could not explain her achievements as she was able to answer his questions including obtuse mathematical problems filling a blackboard even before he had finished writing the question.
He asked her a question which took him personally three hours to solve and it would have taken other professors may be six hours. She solved it in practically no time or in a jiffy that is without thinking. He attributed her achievement to intuition. I am personally inclined since I met her more than once to agree she is gifted. It is a divine blessing.
Another Indian who showed similar powers was a rickshaw puller called Shankaran who used to take an English professor every morning to a college and simply answered questions without apparently thinking however complicated they were. He was fortunate to meet with the professor who arranged to send him to the Oxford University. He did not need to be asked a question as he simply visualized it as we visualize a place or an event. He was seeing the question then the answer. He could read your mind, the professor said. He became a phenomenon in himself in the history of mathematics because, according to his biography, he solved problems that had remained unsolved for many years.
Only a few years ago the world press, including our own, published a story of a professor who solved an intractable mathematical problem after some years of hard work, sweat and tears. But that was hard work and dedication of unusual standard. Shakuntala and Shankaran do it in no time.
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- Farouk Luqman is an eminent journalist based in Jeddah.