Shakuntala Devi is getting a biopic but who is she?

Popular actress Vidya Balan announced on Wednesday that she would be playing Shakuntala Devi in a biopic to be released in the summer of 2020. The movie will be directed by Anu Menon.

Who was Shakuntala Devi?

Nicknamed the ‘Human Computer’, Devi was born on Nov. 4, 1929, in Bangalore, which at the time was part of the Mysore state in British India. Shakuntala was born into a Kannada Brahmin family. Her father worked in the circus as a trapeze artist, a lion tamer and a magician among other things.

Her talent was discovered by her father when he was playing cards with her. Her father is said to have lost to her, not by sleight of hand but because she had memorised all the cards. Her father realised that she was a prodigy when he discovered his daughter’s ability to memorise numbers accurately at such a young age.

Devi started solving mathematical problems at the age of five and started public performances at the age of six. Her first performance was at the University of Mysore.

There was no looking back as she went on to give hundreds of public performances in different parts of the world. Often termed a ‘mental calculator’, Devi first toured Europe in 1950 and moved to London with her father at the age of 15. Devi performed in New York in 1976 where she calculated the cube root of 188,132,517 in under 20 seconds.

Following her performance, an article in the New York Times read, “She could give you the cube root of 188,132,517 — or almost any other number — in the time it took to ask the question. If you gave her any date in the last century, she would tell you what day of the week it fell on.”

In 1977, at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, she calculated the 23rd root of a 201-digit number in 50 seconds. The same number was calculated by a UNIVAC 1101 computer in 62 seconds, 12 seconds longer than Devi had taken. The UNIVAC 1101 was the first personal computer launched in the United States. In fact, the scale of the calculation was so high that programmers had to write a special code just to confirm Shakuntala Devi’s answer.

In 1980 at the Imperial College in London, she multiplied two 13-digit numbers in only 28 seconds. The remarkable achievement earned her a place in the 1982 edition of the ‘Guinness Book of World Records’.

“The result is so far superior to anything previously reported that it can only be described as unbelievable,” said Steven. B. Smith, a Yale professor in his book titled ‘The Great Mental Calculators: The Psychology, Methods and Lives of Calculating Prodigies Past and Present.’

In 1988, she was studied by Prof. Arthur Jensen, a psychology professor from the University of California, Berkeley. Jensen conducted various complex mathematical tests to study her performance. Jensen said that there was an incident where Devi gave him the answer to a question before he had even copied it into his notebook. He published his findings in an academic journal called ‘Intelligence’.

When Devi returned to Bangalore in 1955, she joined the Kalamandir School of Arts that was founded and run in Gandhi Bazaar by renowned artist Aa Na Subbarao. She became a prominent member of Chitra artistes, a popular amateur drama troupe attached to Kala Mandir.

READ MORE: Math wizard Shakuntala Devi dead

Reminiscing a legend

In 1977, Devi wrote a book called ‘The World of Homosexuals’. In the Vismita Gupta Smith documentary titled, ‘For Straights Only’, she talks about her marriage to a homosexual man, which led her to study the subject and eventually write the book. Writing a book on such a sensitive topic in the 1970s was a ‘pioneering’ effort. She divorced her husband Paritosh Banerji in 1979. He was an Indian Administrative Service Officer from Kolkata.

In 1980, Devi contested in the Lok Sabha Elections as an independent from two different constituencies, Mumbai South and Medak (in present-day Telangana). She stood against Indira Gandhi in Medak and openly expressed her criticisms of her. She finished ninth in Medak recording only 1.4 per cent of the vote share.

Devi authored several cookbooks and novels as well. She has also written a book on astrology titled ‘Astrology for You’. On April 21, 2013, Devi passed away in Bengaluru at the age of 84 after a battle with respiratory and cardiac problems. Devi is survived by her daughter and two grandchildren.

In spite of achievements outside the field of mathematics, Devi's love for the subject always shone through. She stated that everything in the world was tied to the world of mathematics.

She said, “Without mathematics, there’s nothing you can do. Everything around you is mathematics. Everything around you is numbers.”