How can you be as intelligent as Shakuntala Devi?
The Maths subject has a different charm among all other subjects. Whether you hate it or love it, it continues to show its magic through numbers. Wonder how some combinations of numbers do the trick and you get the result? Shakuntala Devi was one of the living legends known as the human-computer. Until she was alive no one was as intelligent as Shakuntala Devi.
How was Shakuntala Devi so intelligent?
In Indian style, you would say, she is god gifted. Without any formal education, Shakuntala Devi was a true magician of numbers. Born to a circus performer and born and brought up in a simple Kannada brahmin family, Shakuntala Devi showcased her calculating abilities from as young as 3 years old. Her father saw her ability while teaching her a card trick. From here onwards, he left his circus job and took her daughter to the streets to prove her genius mind and earn a living.
Guiness Book of Records
One of her skills to multiply 2 13-digit numbers and give the answer in just 28 seconds, got her place in the Guinness Book of Records in 1982. Other remarkable calculations by Shakuntala Devi were:
- extracting cube roots of large numbers, which she could do in her head rapidly while still a child in the 1930s
- higher roots: This means that 46,295 multiplied by itself seven times yields that number of 27 digits; Shakuntala Devi worked backwards from the 7th power to derive the root.
- Calendar calculations: Given any date in the last century, she could instantly say which day of the week that date fell on.
From where did she learn the skills?
One of the most comprehensive accounts is the report on the tests at the University of California-Berkeley in 1988. The psychologist Jensen, who died in 2012, published his findings in the journal Intelligence in 1990. Jensen could not figure out the secret of her skills.
“Devi ‘perceives’ large numbers differently from the way most of us ordinarily do. When she takes in a large number (and she must do this visually), it undergoes some transformation, almost instantly — usually some kind of simplification of the number,” Jensen wrote.
Can you be as intelligent as her?
Well, there’s no doubt that she was god gifted but the most important aspect is to know your own abilities. It is not always scoring high in schools and universities that prove you are good at something. In fact, it’s the reaction to a particular action that your brain gives out as soon as you perceive the sight in front of you.
Once you believe in your abilities, keep nurturing them by reading and practising more on the subject. And above all, never doubt your abilities and let ego set in the place of humbleness.
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