Word: shakuntala
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...When Shakuntala Devi was five years old in Bangalore, India, she liked to sit at the side of her uncle, who was studying mathematics at the university. As a joke, he told the little girl about cube roots. One day, when Shakuntala wanted money to buy candy, she offered to help her uncle with a problem in cube root if he would finance the candy. When he laughed, she promptly wrote down the correct answer on a sheet of paper...
From then on, Shakuntala (meaning "baby brought up by the birds") was a marked little Brahman. Her odd mathematical ability improved rapidly with practice, and soon she was giving demonstrations all over India. Later, she moved on to Europe, confounding mathematics experts and makers of computing machines...
Last week sari-clad Shakuntala, now 20, gave a demonstration in Washington before a party of reporters and mathematics professors. She had become a master of the arm-long number. Without error or hesitation she extracted fourth, fifth and sixth roots of numbers up to ten digits. (Her record to date: extracting the 20th root of a 42 -digit number and multiplying figures that yielded a 39-digit result.) Without hesitation, she worked out "magic squares" (horizontal, vertical and diagonal sums are identical), starting with random numbers suggested by the audience...
Like most number prodigies, Shakuntala does not know how she does it. She thinks about the problem and the numbers come - in three or four seconds. Often she gives the answer as soon as her questioner has written down the last digit. In the case of the root problems, the answer must be a whole number. Her mysterious talent does not yield uneven answers. She has studied logarithms, but they confused her and she does not use them...
Mathematicians suggest that Shakuntala may have a fantastic memory, big enough to store all possible answers to all the tricks she offers. But this, they say, would be a startling feat in itself, probably as difficult as doing the computation in her head. Shakuntala herself, off on a crosscountry tour of the U.S., just tries to avoid all discussion for fear it will disturb her strange talent. Says she: "I do not know my limits...
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