What is the source of this talent, I asked. My turn arrived, and after a warm greeting, Shakuntala Devi led me to a chair beside her altar on which a small murthi of Lord Ganesha sat amid offerings of fruit and flowers. Her life has been one of traveling the world and demonstrating her remarkable talents ever since. ("I've lost track," she says.) Her father was once a circus trapeze and tightrope performer, later a human cannonball.Īt age 3, Shakuntala Devi's prodigious ability to calculate numbers was noticed when she began doing her father's card tricks, (he had his own touring magic show by then), not with sleight-of-hand or pre-arrangement of the deck, but by memorizing in order all 52 cards. Devi is the oldest of four sisters, and now in her mid-40s. Born to a Brahmin family in Bangalore, India, Mrs. And yet some of the simplest details of personal memory are often misplaced.
Any day of the week from any year in the last century? Easy, 29 to the 47th power? Child's play. Roots, both square and cube, logarithms, and calendar calculations are answered almost before the question is fully asked. The computer required over 13 thousand instructions and thousands of data-locations, and took over a minute to solve the mega-problem.
Devi had bested the then world's fastest computer, the Univac 1108, in a head-to-chip contest to find the 23rd root of a 201 digit number. "Shakuntala Devi," one article said, "made the Guiness Book of World Records a few years ago (1980) by multiplying two 13-digit numbers – correctly of course – in 28 seconds." Another detailed how 3 years earlier, at Southern Methodist University in Texas, Mrs. To another, "Who's next?" And to me, "I'll be with you soon." Her economy of words hinted at the talents I'd come to investigate and still held in awe. "We'll talk next week," she said, bidding one client good bye.
It felt like any waiting room: a courteous receptionist, a ball game on TV, families chatting, each of us waiting for our one-on-one or group consultation with the extraordinary woman dispensing wisdom and astrology in the adjoining room of this Sunnyvale, California, apartment.īefore long a smiling, straight-standing woman appeared, looking regal in her sari.
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