Birthday of Human Computer Sakuntala Devi

Born November 4, 1929
Bangalore, India
Died April 21, 2013 (aged 83)
Bangalore, Karnataka, India
Cause of death Respiratory and cardiac problems
Nationality Indian
Other names Human computer

Shakuntala Devi (November 4, 1929 – April 21, 2013), popularly known as the "Human Computer", was a child prodigy and mental calculator.Her talents earned her a place in the 1982 edition of The Guinness Book of World Records.

Biography

Shakuntala Devi was born in Bangalore, India,[2][3] to an orthodox Kannada Brahmin family. Her father rebelled against becoming a temple priest[3] and instead joined a circus where he worked as a trapeze artist, lion tamer, tightrope walker and magician.Devi's father discovered her ability to memorize numbers while teaching her a card trick when she was about three years old.Her father left the circus and took her on road shows that displayed her ability at number crunching.She was able to do this without any formal education.By age six she demonstrated her calculation and memorization abilities at the University of Mysore.

In 1944 Devi moved to London with her father.[9] She returned to India in the mid-1960s and married Paritosh Bannerji, an officer of the Indian Administrative Service from Kolkata.[9] She and her husband were divorced in 1979.[9] Devi returned to Bangalore in the early 1980s.[9]

Devi travelled the world demonstrating her arithmetic talents, including a tour of Europe in 1950 and a performance in New York in 1976.[2] In 1988 she returned to the US to have her abilities studied by Arthur Jensen, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Jensen tested her performance at several tasks, including the calculations of large numbers; Examples of the problems presented to Devi were calculating the cube root of 61,629,875, and the seventh root of 170,859,375.[3][4] Jensen reported that Devi was able to provide the solution to the aforementioned problems (the answers being 395 and 15 respectively) before Jensen was able to copy them down in his notebook.Jensen published his findings in the academic journal Intelligence in 1990.

In addition to her work as a mental calculator, Devi was an astrologer and an author of several books, including cookbooks and fictional novels.

In 1977, she published the first. study of homosexuality in India. According to Subhash Chandra's review of Ana Garcia-Arroyo's book The Construction of Queer Culture in India: Pioneers and Landmarks,

For Garcia-Arroyo the beginning of the debate on homosexuality in the twentieth century is made with Shakuntala Devi's book The World of Homosexuals published in 1977. [...] Shakuntala Devi's (the famous mathematician) book appeared. This book went almost unnoticed, and did not contribute to queer discourse or movement. [...] The reason for this book not making its mark was because Shakuntala Devi was famous for her mathematical wizardry and nothing of substantial import in the field of homosexuality was expected from her. Another factor for the indifference meted out to the book could perhaps be a calculated silence because the cultural situation in India was inhospitable for an open and elaborate discussion on this issue.