Indian Mathematical Genius and child prodigy Shakuntala Devi
passed away on April 21 2013. The papers
say “Hundreds of people, including relatives, friends and admirers were present
at her last rites, which was performed in a southern suburb of Bangalore before
sunset.”
Let us look at her notable achievements (Source: Wikipedia)
In 1977 in USA she
competed with a computer to see who give the cube root of 188138517 faster, she
won. At the Southern Methodist University she was asked to give the
23rd root of a 201-digit number; she answered in 50 seconds. Her
answer—546,372,891—was confirmed by calculations done at the U.S. Bureau of
Standards by the Univac 1101 computer, for which a special program had to be
written to perform such a large calculation.
On June 18, 1980, she
demonstrated the multiplication of two 13-digit numbers 7,686,369,774,870 x
2,465,099,745,779 picked at random by the Computer Department of Imperial
College, London. She correctly answered 18,947,668,177,995,426,462,773,730 in
28 seconds. This event is mentioned in the 1982 Guinness Book of Records.
Holy Cow! I cannot
even remember these numbers in 28 seconds.
Anyway, where are our leaders and politicians at the time of her funeral? Does India not owe something to Shakuntala Devi? The lady put us on the limelight in the world
when India was considered a backward and armpit of a country. May be she should have created a scandal or a
sensation to get everybody’s attention.
The above event just highlights the misplaced morality that
stinks up in our parliamentarians. There
is no point in attending a funeral if there is no extensive media coverage, I
guess. She had a dream of creating a
university for Mathematics. We have politicians
who tom-tom the need for education in this country and yet geniuses like
Shakuntala Devi remained untapped potential citizens.
Anyway, I must pay my respects. I have read all her books on number and
mathematics while I was preparing for my entrance examinations. She brought the joy back in to numbers. I have also read her insightful book on
astrology.
“Devi used very distinctive but offbeat techniques, which
were not always based on theorem, but her methods were correct and gave
results. Her capability to perform sophisticated computation, which could beat
computers, gave her a stature of a computational wizard. Her death is a great
loss to us all," said Professor Y. Narahari, chairman of the computer
science department at the Indian Institute of Science.” (Source: ibtimes .com)
God Bless Her Soul!
