Google celebrates the 84-year birth anniversary of Shakuntala Devi, famously called the "Human Computer" for her astounding mental calculating abilities with a Doodle that resembles a calculator screen.
Shakuntala Devi, the woman who triumphed over a computer, demonstrating incredible calculating abilities has been honored by the web giant on her 84-year birth anniversary with a Doodle that resembles a calculator screen. Born and raised in India, Devi was a child math prodigy. Popularly known as "Human Calculator," she could make complex mathematical calculations faster than a computer, which secured her a place in 1982 edition of "The Guinness Book of World Records."
Devi's gift earned her great fame. She could memorize and calculate numbers as early as at 3 years of age. In 1977, Devi competed against a computer in the U.S. to answer the cube root of 188132517. She won the competition calculating the complex number faster than the computer. She proved her skills time and again. In 1980, she multiplied two 13-digit numbers picked at random by the Computer Department of Imperial College, London. She got the answer right in just 28 seconds!
Besides Devi's amazing talent, she was also a skilled author. She wrote books like 'Fun with Numbers', 'Astrology for You', 'Puzzles to Puzzle You', and 'Mathablit'. She even published the first study on 'Homosexuality' in India. Recorded in a documentary 'For Straights only', Devi said her interest in the subject aroused from her marriage to a homosexual man.
Her talent had created a sense of curiosity, which even led to a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, Arthur Jensen to conduct tests on her calculating skills. Jensen wrote in his report that Devi was able to mentally calculate the answer for a given problem even before he could jot it down. His detailed findings were published in a journal "Intelligence" in 1990.
This is Devi's first birthday after her death in April 2013. She passed away in a hospital in Bangalore, India, due to respiratory problems at the age of 83.
