All of you might know about Shakuntala Devi as
she was very famous for her mathematical exploits. Some mathematicians are off
the beaten track and Shakuntala Devi was one of them.
She was born at Bangalore into a Kannada
Brahmin family in 1929. Her father worked as a trapeze artist, lion tamer,
tightrope walker and a magician. Theirs is a most unusual family that had
nothing going for mathematics. Then how did she come across mathematics?
Her father discovered her ability at the age of
3 when he was trying to teach her a card trick. On that, her father left the
circus and started taking her on road shows where she displayed her ability at
calculation. At the age of 6 she demonstrated her mathematical ability at the
University of Mysore. She did all this without any formal education whatsoever.
That her father took the chance to leave his
livelihood for her was because he must have seen that she had something special
in him.
In 1944, at the age of 15 Shakuntaladevi moved
to London. She then travelled to many countries of the world to display her
mathematical talents.
In 1988 she travelled to the US and was
examined by Professor Jensen of University of California at Berkeley. Jensen
tested her in various tasks, among them included calculating the cube root of
61,629,875 and the 7th root of 170,859,375. She gave the answers to
them before Jensen could copy them down in a note book.
In 1977, at the Southern Methodist University
she computed the 23rd root of a 201 digit number in 50 seconds. Her
answer was confirmed by the US Bureau of Standards using the UNIVAC 1101
computer which took 62 seconds to compute the right answer.
In 1980, at the Imperial College, London she
multiplied 2, 13 digit numbers in 28 seconds. This entered the Guinness Book of
Records in 1982.
Shakuntala Devi returned back to India in mid-1960’s
and got married to an IAS Officer from Calcutta, Paritosh Banerjee. She wrote a
book on Homosexuality in 1977 which gave a call for de criminalization of
homosexuality and acceptance of it. The idea was revolutionary at that time as
then homosexuality was considered to be a perversion and an anomaly while the Supreme
Court accepted it today.
Later, she said that her husband was a
homosexual and that was why she wrote a book on the subject. In 1979 they got
divorced. Later her daughter Anupama Banerjee claimed that Shakuntala Devi lied
about her father being a homosexual in order to promote her book.
I joined SBI as a Probationary Officer in 1982
and when I posted this in my batchmates group, I got a new insight on her.
Raghu Bagalwadi, mya batch mate who is originally from Karnataka like her
narrated an incident with her that proves she is not a good human being at all.
Raghu left the SBI and became the Chief General Manager of IDBI and was at their
Head office at Mumbai. Shakuntala Devi had an account with one of the branches
of IDBI at Mumbai. One day a cheque was presented in clearing on her account
and his Branch Manager (who never heard of her) returned the cheque. Actually
Raghu had no business to mollify her, but since she is famous and on top of
that she is from his home state of Karnataka, he went to her house to meet her
and apologize. But to his surprise she used most unruly language and expletives
on him. Posting that he said all geniuses need not be good persons despite us assuming
so.
She contested as an MP in the Loksabha
elections in 1980 against Indira Gandhi in and lost with a huge margin and came
ninth with just 500 votes and Came 9th.
She died in 2013 aged 83 with respiratory problems.
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