Shakuntala Devi, The Human Computer Who Calculated Complex Cube Roots At The Age Of 5

Have you ever been bowled over by mental math competitions and wondered how these little kids are born geniuses? Secretly, you must have also doubted about the credibility of such talents. How can they do the calculations faster than computers, right? But some people are just born with it.

Shakuntala Devi AKA the Human Computer

One of them was Shakuntala Devi, the mathematics genius who was fondly called the Human Computer.

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¡°What truly fascinates me is that you wouldn't normally associate a fun person with math¡­ and she completely turns that perception on its head,¡± that's what Vidya Balan said about Shakuntala Devi, the woman whose role she is playing in the upcoming biopic.

19 Interesting Facts about the Mathematician Shakuntala Devi

Before you watch the film, here are some of the interesting facts about her that will simply blow your mind.

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1. At the age of three, she stunned her father by winning each time while playing cards. Her father thought she was cheating, but all she was doing was memorising the cards and sequences, and using that to her advantage by calculating probability.

2. It is then that her father, who rebelled to join a circus as a trapeze artist instead of becoming a priest, quit his job and did road shows to demonstrate her ability at calculations.

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3. She was now the sole breadwinner of her family. By the age of five, she could compute cube roots in her mind and would appear on radio shows to display her talent.

4. At the age of six, Devi displayed her arithmetic abilities at the University of Mysore. She then moved to London with her father in 1944, and then, her journey of global recognition began.

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5. She would take questions from the audiences, and in mere seconds she would give the right answer that included fifth roots of seven-digit numbers and cube roots of ten-digit numbers too.

6. Not only would she solve complex calculations within seconds, if you were to give Shakuntala Devi any date in the century, she could tell you which day it would fall on.

7. The unimaginable happened when her calculations were pronounced wrong in 1950 during an interview with BBC. But was she really wrong? Of course not! They were forced to calculate again and admit their error. This happened again at University of Rome. Computers could be wrong, but Devi was always right.

8. She extracted the 23rd root of a 201-digit number in 50 seconds at Southern Methodist University of Dallas in 1977. With this, she had beaten a univac computer, which did the same calculation in 62 seconds.

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9. She etched her name in the history as Human Computer in 1980. But she never liked the title Human Computer. Why? According to her, the human mind is much more capable than a computer. So to equate it with a computer, was unfair, as per her.

10. Two years later, she also cemented her name in the Guinness Book of World Records after she demonstrated the multiplication of two 13-digit numbers (7,686,369,774,870 ¡Á 2,465,099,745,779) picked randomly by the Computer Department of Imperial College London. She gave the correct answer (18,947,668,177,995,426,462,773,730) in 28 seconds, which is the time taken by her to speak the answer.

11. She calculated the 23rd root of a 201-digit number in just 50 seconds and stunned the professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, Arthur Jensen, with her abilities in 1988.

12. She could calculate in seconds but she was not really inclined towards mathematics. ¡°It has just a limited appeal¡­ I¡¯m not particularly interested in math¡­ What we need is more humanity,¡± she had once said.

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13. But fame at an early age wasn¡¯t easy for her. So much so, she wanted to become a Sanyasini. "I wanted to improve my abilities, publish books on mathematics, and win fame, but fellow students in my college would not concede that I was gifted¡­ I got very much disgusted with life ¡­ and sought refuge in the Vyasaraya Mutt. ¡­ I wanted to renounce the world and become a sanyasini," she told TOI in an interview with 1950.

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14. She took a political plunge as well when she contested in the 1980 Lok Sabha elections in South Bombay and Medak in Telangana against Indira Gandhi. She didn¡¯t win.

15. But then, she switched to astrology, and also wrote several books on puzzles, numbers and human memory.

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16. She was a strong voice for feminists too. "Marriage would only mean another of life¡¯s bondages. I do not want to give any man an opportunity to say that if I made a name it was because of his help," she said in an interview before her marriage and added, I believe in equality both ways. ¡­ I do not even wear the traditional symbols of marriage."

17. She was married to a homosexual man, and so, she wrote a book on homosexuality called The World Of Homosexuals, which is considered the first study of homosexuality in India. She had divorced her husband, Paritosh Banerji, an IAS officer from Kolkata, after he came out of the closet.

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18. Shakuntala Devi breathed her last at the age of 83 in 2013 in Bangalore. She was admitted after she suffered complications in heart and kidney.

19. She is survived by her daughter Anupama Banerjee and two grandchildren. It is said that her daughter got emotional when she saw Vidya in the role of her mother on the sets of the film.

The film is slated to release on July 31 on Amazon Prime Video.