Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Shakuntala Devi: Numerical wizard honored in Google Doodle
Shakuntala Devi, India’s magician of numbers and so-called “human calculator,” is honored in a Google Doodle this afternoon. Ms. Devi, who died in April, would have been 84-years-old today.
Devi was born in Bangalore, India on Nov. 4, 1929. Her father was a circus acrobat and, upon finding that his daughter was at just three-years-old an obvious mathematical savant, soon began organizing road shows to showcase her unusual talent for numbers.
Like her father, Devi emerged as an adroit performer, but with a twist: her displays of cerebral somersaulting were, well, cerebral. There was nothing to see but Devi deliver the final answer, before the public had even managed to take that breath of anticipation – would she be able to answer? Would she get it right? Despite the invisibleness of her act, or perhaps because of it, her almost magical performances of computational adroitness held audience’s un-yielding attention.
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