“SHAKUNTALA DEVI: A SAGA OF CIPHERING QUEEN”
Biography
 |
| (November 4, 1929 – April 21, 2013) |
Shakuntala Devi was born in Bangalore,
India, to an orthodox priestly family. Her father rebelled against becoming a
temple priest and instead joined a circus, where he worked as a trapeze and tightrope performer, and later as a lion tamer and a human cannonball Shakuntala
Devi was only around three years old and she was roped in to help her father
with card tricks. Her father left the circus and took her on road shows that
displayed her amazing ability at number crunching. It is worth noting that she
was able to do this, despite having had no formal education By
age six she demonstrated her calculation and memorization abilities at the University
of Mysore. At the
age of eight she had success at Annamalai
University by doing the same. In 2006 she released In the Wonderland of Numbers which talks
about a girl Neha and her fascination for numbers. She developed the concept of
'mind dynamics'.
Shakuntala
Devi returned to India in the mid-1960s and married Paritosh Banerji, a senior
IAS officer from Kolkata. The couple had a daughter, Anupama Banerji.
Shakuntala Devi returned to Bangalore in early 1980s.
Achievements
- In 1977 in USA she competed with a computer to see who give the cube root of 188138517 faster, she won.
- At the Southern Methodist University she was asked to give the 23rd root of a 201-digit number; she answered in 50 seconds Her answer—546,372,891—was confirmed by calculations done at the U.S. Bureau of Standards by the Univac 1101 computer, for which a special program had to be written to perform such a large calculation.
- On June 18, 1980, she demonstrated the multiplication of two 13-digit numbers 7,686,369,774,870 x 2,465,099,745,779 picked at random by the Computer Department of Imperial College, London. She answered 18,947,668,177,995,426,462,773,730 in 28 seconds which was exactly correct. This event is mentioned in the 1982 Guinness Book of Records.
