Shakuntala Devi Wiki, Age, Bio, Height, Husband, Career, and Net Worth

Shakuntala Devi was a well-known Indian author and mental calculator. Shakuntala Devi became famous as the “Human Calculator.”

Wiki, Bio, Family, Siblings, Childhood & Education

Shakuntala Devi was born in Bangalore, Karnataka, on November 4, 1929. She was 83 years old when she passed away. Her father, C V Sundararaja Rao, gave birth to her, but her mother’s identity is unclear. Rather than becoming a temple priest, her father joined a circus and worked as a trapeze artist, lion tamer, tightrope walker, and magician.

When Shakuntala was three years old, he noticed her ability to memorize numbers while teaching her a card trick. His father soon quit the circus and traveled around the streets with her daughter to show off her talent to the rest of the world. Similarly, she was of Indian descent, but her ethnicity was uncertain.

Furthermore, she accomplished this while having no formal schooling. She first showed her mathematical abilities at the University of Mysore when she was six years old. Devi relocated to London, England, in 1944.

Shakuntala Devi’s Age, Height, Weight, and Body Dimensions

Similarly, there is no information regarding her physical parameters, such as height, weight, dress size, shoe size, dress size, and so on. However, based on her photographs, we may presume she has black eyes and black hair.

Mental arithmetic

Devi traveled to many different countries to demonstrate her mathematical prowess. While on a tour to Europe in 1950, she visited New York City in 1976. In 1988, she traveled to the United States to have her abilities evaluated by Arthur Jensen, a professor of educational psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Jensen put her to the test in a variety of activities, including huge number calculations.

Devi was tasked with calculating the seventh root of 170,859,375 and the cube root of 61,629,875. Jensen said that Devi provided him with the answers to the aforementioned issues (395 and 15, respectively) before he could write them down. Jensen published his findings in the scholarly journal Intelligence in 1990.

In 1977, at Southern Methodist University, she provided the 23rd root of a 201-digit number in about 50 seconds. The UNIVAC 1101 computer at the US Bureau of Standards, which required special software to conduct such a massive computation and took longer to complete than her own, corroborated her figure, which was 546,372,891.

On June 18, that year, she multiplied two 13-digit numbers, 7,686,369,774,870 and 2,465,099,745,779. Imperial College London’s Department of Computing chose these numbers at random. She accurately responded 18,947,668,177,995,426,462,773,730 in 28 seconds.

This incident was included in the 1982 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records. “The result is so far superior to anything previously reported,” author Steven Smith says, “that it can only be described as unbelievable.” Shakuntala Devi explained several of the ways she uses to accomplish arithmetic in her head in her 1977 book Figuring: The Joy of Numbers.

Homosexuality book

She was chastised for her 1977 book The World of Homosexuals, the first scholarly study on homosexuality to be published in India. In the documentary For Straights Only, she stated that she was interested in the topic since she was married to a homosexual guy and wanted to understand more about homosexuality.

The “pioneering” book includes interviews with two young Indian homosexual men, a male couple wishing to legally marry in Canada, a temple priest discussing his views on homosexuality, and a study of existing literature on the subject. In the end, a call is made for the decriminalization of homosexuality and for “full and complete acceptance, not tolerance and sympathy.” The work, however, was generally overlooked at the time.

Shakuntala Devi’s Husband, Marriage & Relationship

Shakuntala Devi married Paritosh Banerji, an IAS officer, after returning to India in the 1960s. The couple decided to split in 1979. The couple’s daughter, Anupama Banerjee, was born. Shakuntala ran as an independent from Mumbai South and Medak in the 1980 Lok Sabha elections. In Medak, she ran against Indira Gandhi and lost. In addition to her passion for arithmetic, Shakuntla Devi was an astrologer and the author of various publications.

Shakuntala Devi’s Salary and Net Worth

Shakuntala had made a good living during her illustrious career. At the time of her death, she had a net worth of $2 million.

Legacy and Death

Devi was hospitalized at a hospital in Bangalore in April 2013 with serious respiratory problems. Over the next two weeks, she had kidney and heart issues. On April 21, 2013, she died at a hospital. She was 83 years old. Her daughter, Anupama Bannerji, lives in London with her husband, Ajay Abhaya Kumar, and their two daughters.

Devi was also recognized with a Google Doodle on November 4, 2013, the day before her 84th birthday. Shakuntala Devi, a film about her life, was announced in May 2019. Sanya Malhotra, Amit Sadh, and Jisshu Sengupta also appear in the film, which stars Vidya Balan as the lead. The film, produced by Sony Pictures Networks Productions, will be available on Amazon Prime Video on July 31, 2020.

Shakuntala Devi’s Social Media(Facebook, Twitter, Instagram)

Despite her celebrity, Devi was not active on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. She preferred to keep her personal life out of the spotlight of the media.

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