Daughter of a circus performer, she travelled with her parents since she was three years old, and is said to have cultivated her calculating abilities while performing card tricks. (Express Archive/R K Sharma)īy all accounts, Shakuntala Devi was entirely self-taught. Shakuntala Devi was popularly known as the ‘human calculating machine’. But when the dates were stated to her in the order year, month, day (for example 1920-July-31), “her answers came about as fast as one could start the stopwatch”, the 1988 test at Berkeley found. If the date was stated in the order month, day, year (for example, July-13-1920), her average response time was about 1 second. For example, if you gave her the date July 31, 1920, she would immediately tell you that it was a Saturday. * Calendar calculations: Given any date in the last century, she could instantly say which day of the week that date fell on. At Imperial College on June 18, 1980, Shakuntala Devi was asked to multiply two 13-digit numbers: * Long multiplication: This is the skill that got her into the Guinness Book of Records in 1982.
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