Google pays tributes with a doodle to Shankuntala Devi who belonged to Bangalore calculated cube root of 188138517 competing with a computer in Dallas in 1977 and she came with the right answer first defeating the computer. Then in 1980, she multiplied two figures of 13 digits each in flat 28 seconds of time and the event is mentioned in the Guinness Book of World Records in 1995. The figures were 7,686,369,774,870 multiplied by 2,465,099,745,779 which were randomly selected by the Computer Department of Imperial College, London.
Computer is meant for its speed and accuracy. But she competed with the computer and won. That is why she was considered as the fastest human computer. She was born on 4th November 1929 at Bangalore and deprived of proper food and education at her early years of age. She showed interest in numbers at her age of 3 and became an astonishing mathematical wizard girl at the age of 5 to solve complex arithmetic problems.
Many times the sophisticated gadgets looked inferior before her sharpness. She wrote books on numbers like ‘Fun with Numbers’, ‘Astrology for You’, ‘Puzzles to Puzzle You’ and ‘Mathablit’. She gave her first public performance at the age of 6 at Annamalai University.
Shakuntala Devi died at the age of 83 at Bangalore hospital on April 21, 2013. Google remembers Shankuntala Devi and pays tributes to her with a doodle you can see when you open Google search engine today.
-SriJa
