Devi was also an astrologer and gave remedies purportedly based on date and time of birth.
In 1977, Devi extracted the 23rd root of a 201-digit number mentally. In the same year in Dallas, she competed with a computer to see who gives the cube root of 188138517 faster and she won.
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 answered the question in 28 seconds flat. This event is mentioned in the 1995 Guinness Book of Records.
"Why do children dread mathematics?", she was once asked. "Because of the wrong approach. Because it is looked at as a subject," pat came her reply.
"Mathematics is life, you have math in everything, right from time to your date of birth to the food you eat and the air you breathe," she states. The right age to train children in mathematics is six, says Shakuntala, who sparkled at three.
Shakuntala Devi recently passed away on April 21, 2013 in a hospital in Bangalore following respiratory problems.
(With PTI inputs)
