Google doodle fetes Shakuntala Devi, India's 'human computer'

India’s mathematical prodigy Shakuntala Devi who passed away in April this year, has been paid tribute by Google, which has made her the subject of its doodle today. Had she been alive, Devi would have turned 81 today.

Visitors to 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.

[caption id=“attachment_1209615” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Screengrab of the Google Doodle[/caption]

The mathematical prodigy held a Guinness World Record for her lightning-speed calculations. Among her distinctions was her ability to, given a date in the last century, mentally ascertain the day.

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In 1977, she calculated the 23rd root of a 201-digit number in just 50 seconds. In 1980, she multiplied two 13-digit numbers given to her randomly by the Computer Department of Imperial College, London.

She wrote numerous books like ‘Fun with Numbers’, ‘Astrology for You’, ‘Puzzles to Puzzle You’, and ‘Mathablit’.

Devi traveled the world demonstrating her arithmetic talents, including a tour of Europe in 1950 and a performance in New York in 1976.

In 1988 she had her abilities studied by Arthur Jensen, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Jensen tested her performance at several tasks, including the calculations of large numbers; Examples of the problems presented to Devi were calculating the cube root of 61,629,875, and the seventh root of 170,859,375.

Jensen reported that Devi was able to provide the solution to the aforementioned problems (the answers being 395 and 15 respectively) before Jensen was able to copy them down in his notebook. He published his findings in the academic journal Intelligence in 1990.

According to this report in NDTV, It was while she was playing cards with her father at the tender age of three that he found his daughter’s calculation abilities. It turned out that she beat him not by sleight of hand, but by memorising the cards.

At the age of six, she demonstrated her calculation skills in her first major public performance at the University of Mysore and two years later, she again proved herself successful as a child prodigy at Annamalai University.

In 1977, she published the first study of homosexuality in India. In the documentary For Straights Only, she says that her interest in the topic came out of her marriage to a homosexual man, and subsequent desire to look at homosexuality more closely in order to understand it.