Weird Mathematician!

                                                               1 Peter 1:24-25
                                                                      24 For,
                                                   "All men are like grass,
                                and all their glory is like the flowers of the field;
                                       the grass withers and the flowers fall,
                                    25 but the word of the Lord stands forever."
                                   And this is the word that was preached to you.
                                                                                                              NIV

                                                          Weird Mathematician !

1   Shankutala Devi was an Indian woman of immense arithmetical ability. She was born in November 4, 1929 in Bangalore, British India. She had no formal education, had once described her ability as a ‘gift’. She was nicknamed human computer.Among her numerous achievement in the world of numbers are those mentioned below:

·        In 1977 in USA she competed with a computer to see who gives 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. It took the computer one minute and 13 000 instructions to check her answer and prove her right.

·        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 correctly answered 18,947,668,177,995,426,462,773,730 in 28 seconds. This event is mentioned in the 1982 Guinness Book of World Records.

“It is sad that her techniques to simplify math were not used by educational institutions,” said D.C. Shivdev, a trustee of the Shakuntala Devi Educational Foundation Public Trust.

“She strove to simplify math for students and help them get over their math phobia. It is a pity that her techniques died with her.”

She wrote several books including Fun with Numbers, Puzzles to Puzzle You, and Awaken the Genius in Your Child.

On April 21, 2013 at around 8:15 am, Shakuntala Devi died at a hospital in Bangalore, India. She had been admitted to the Bangalore hospital on April 3 as her kidneys had become weak and she also had respiratory problems. She was 83 years old and is survived by a daughter, AnupamaBanerji.