What About Shakuntala Devi?

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!