Indian mathematical Wizard “The Human Computer”
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Shakuntala Devi, “the human computer”, and child prodigy, who was born in Bangalore on November 4, 1929, in a poor family world remembers her death anniversary died due to respiratory and cardiac problems on Sunday 23 April 2013 aged 83. She dropped out of school because her father could not afford the monthly school fees of Rs2.
At the age of 3, while playing cards with her father discovered her uncanny ability to memorise numbers.AS a maths genius she was demonstrating her numerical skills at the circus where her father worked as a performer. At the age of 6, she gave her first major show at the University of Mysore.
During her visit to Hong Kong in 1996, the Indian prodigy was featured in the 1995 Guinness Book of Records for her feat 1980 June 18th feat of demonstrating the multiplication of two 13-digit numbers 7, 686, 369, 774, 870 x 2, 465, 099, 745, 779 picked randomly by the computer department of Imperial College London. She produced the correct answer of 18, 947, 668, 177, 995. 426. 773, 730 in just 29 seconds.
In 1977, at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, she extracted the 23rd root of a 201-digit number in 50 seconds, beating a Univac computer which took 62 seconds.