Table of Biography
Shakuntala Devi was a popular Indian writer and mental calculator. Shakuntala Devi was best known as the “Human Calculator”. Moreover, she was listed in the 1982 edition of The Guinness Book of World Records because of her talent.
Early Life and Childhood
Shakuntala Devi was born on November 4, 1929, in Bangalore, Karnataka. She was 83 years old at the time of her death. She was born to her father C V Sundararaja Rao but her mother’s details are unknown. Instead of becoming a priest in the temple, her father joined a circus and performed as a trapeze artist, lion tamer, tightrope walker, and magician.
He discovered Shakuntala’s capacity for memorizing numbers when she was 3 years old while instructing her in a card trick. Soon after making this discovery, his father left the circus and walked down the streets with her daughter to show off her talent to the rest of the world. Likewise, she held Indian nationality but her ethnicity was unknown.
Education
Furthermore, she achieved this without having any formal education. She first showed off her math prowess at the University of Mysore when she was six years old. Devi relocated to London, Great Britain, in 1944.
Mental Calculation
Devi traveled to many different nations to exhibit her prowess in mathematics. She visited New York City in 1976 while she was on a tour of Europe in 1950. She traveled to the US in 1988 to have Arthur Jensen, a professor of educational psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, examine her abilities. Jensen put her to the test on a variety of tasks, including calculating large numbers.
Devi was given problems like computing the seventh root of 170,859,375 and the cube root of 61,629,875. Jensen claimed that before he could write down the answers to the aforementioned issues (395 and 15, respectively), Devi gave them to him. In 1990, Jensen reported his findings in the scholarly journal Intelligence.
In just 50 seconds, she provided the 23rd root of a 201-digit number in 1977 at Southern Methodist University. Calculations performed by the UNIVAC 1101 computer at the US Bureau of Standards, for which a special program had to be written to perform such a large calculation and which took longer to complete than her own, confirmed her answer, which was 546,372,891.
Moreover, she multiplied two 13-digit numbers, 7,686,369,774,870 and 2,465,099,745,779, on June 18 of that year. The Department of Computing at Imperial College London chose these numbers at random. In 28 seconds, she correctly answered 18,947,668,177,995,426,462,773,730.
The Guinness Book of World Records published in 1982 listed this incident. In the words of author Steven Smith, “The result is so far superior to anything previously reported that it can only be described as unbelievable.” In her 1977 book Figuring: The Joy of Numbers, Shakuntala Devi outlined many of the techniques she used to perform calculations in her head.
Book on homosexuality
She received criticism for The World of Homosexuals, the first academic study of homosexuality to be published in India, which she wrote in 1977. She claimed in the documentary For Straights Only that she was interested in the subject because she was married to a homosexual man and wanted to learn more about homosexuality.
The “pioneering” book includes interviews with two young Indian homosexual men, a male couple looking to wed legally in Canada, a temple priest outlining his views on homosexuality, and a review of the literature already available on the subject. An appeal for the decriminalization of homosexuality and for “complete acceptance, not tolerance and sympathy” is made at the conclusion. However, the book was largely ignored at the time.
Personal Life
After returning to India in the 1960s, Shakuntala Devi got married to Paritosh Banerji, an IAS officer. In 1979, the couple decided to get divorced. Anupama Banerjee, the couple’s daughter, was born. In the 1980 Lok Sabha elections, Shakuntala ran as an independent from Mumbai South and Medak. She ran against Indira Gandhi in Medak and lost the election. Shakuntla Devi was an astrologer and the author of several books in addition to her love of math.
Caption: Shakuntala Devi’s biopic movie
Source: IMDb
Shakuntala Devi – Net Worth 2024
Shakuntala had earned a decent amount of money throughout her successful career. She had a net worth of $2 million at the time of her death.
Death and Legacy
Devi was admitted to a Bangalore hospital in April 2013 with severe respiratory issues. She experienced complications with her kidneys and heart over the next two weeks. In a hospital, she passed away on April 21, 2013. Age-wise, she was 83. Anupama Bannerji, her daughter, resides in London with her husband, Ajay Abhaya Kumar, and their two daughters.
Moreover, Devi was honored with a Google Doodle on November 4, 2013, the day before her 84th birthday. In May 2019, Shakuntala Devi, a movie about her life, was announced. Sanya Malhotra, Amit Sadh, and Jisshu Sengupta also appear in the movie, with Vidya Balan playing the lead role. On July 31, 2020, the movie, which was made by Sony Pictures Networks Productions, went live on Amazon Prime Video.
Social Media
Despite being a popular personality, Shakuntala Devi was not active on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on. She liked to keep her life away from the limelight of the media.
Shakuntala Devi – Body Measurements
Likewise, there are no details about her physical measurements like height, weight, dress size, shoe size, dress size, and so on. But looking at her pictures we can assume that she has a pair of black eyes with black colored hair.