Shakuntala Devi, the late mathematical wizard, who achieved an entry in the famed Guinness Book of World Records for her ability to perform lightning quick calculations on her 84th birth anniversary on Monday, is the latest Indian to be immortalized by search engine Google, in the form of a doodle on its homepage.
The search page of Google are treated to what looks like a calculator screen that forms the word ‘Google’ along with an image of Devi.
Devi’s life was extremely varied. In addition to being an outspoken cultural commentator and a mental calculator, she wrote novels and even cookbooks. Despite her facility with math she was reportedly an avid astrologer, and wrote several book on unlocking the hidden mathematical ability she believed was (to an extent) within all children.
She extracted the 23rd root of a 201-digit number mentally in the year 1977. Shakuntala Devi demonstrated the multiplication of two 13-digit numbers 7,686,369,774,870 x 2,465,099,745,779 picked at random by the Computer Department of Imperial College, London on June 18, 1980 in just 28 seconds.
She could also tell the day of the week of any given date in the last century spontaneously.
She died on April 21, 2013 in Bangalore. She was suffering from respiratory ailments. |