Shakuntala Devi:The Human Computer

I believe the human mind is far superior to computers and it’s unfair to compare the two.

-Shakuntala Devi

Shakuntala Devi (4 November 1929 – 21 April 2013) was an Indian writer and mental calculator, popularly known as the “Human Computer”. Born on November 4, 1939, Shakuntala Devi could not receive any formal education due to financial constraints. She was admitted to St Theresa’s Convent in Chamarajpet (Bengaluru) in Class I, but had to drop out as her parents could not afford the monthly fee of Rs 2. When she was just six years old, Shakuntala displayed her arithmetic abilities at the University of Mysore.

In 1977, at Southern Methodist University, Shakuntala Devi gave the 23rd root of a 201-digit number in 50 seconds. Her answer—546,372,891—was confirmed by calculations done at the US Bureau of Standards by the UNIVAC 1101 computer, for which a special program had to be written to perform such a large calculation.

On 18 June 1980, she demonstrated the multiplication of two 13-digit numbers—7,686,369,774,870 × 2,465,099,745,779. These numbers were picked at random by the Department of Computing at Imperial College London. She correctly answered 18,947,668,177,995,426,462,773,730 in 28 seconds, which was the time taken by her to speak the answer. This event was recorded in the 1982 Guinness Book of Records.

In 1988, she travelled to US to have her abilities studied by Arthur Jensen, a professor of educational psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Jensen tested her performance at several tasks, including the calculation of large numbers. Jensen published his findings in the academic journal Intelligence in 1990.

In 1977, she wrote The World of Homosexuals, the first  study of homosexuality in India, for which she was criticized. In the documentary For Straights Only, she said that her interest in the topic was because of her marriage to a homosexual man and her desire to look at homosexuality more closely to understand it.

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