Lightning Calculators

Asked how many seconds he had lived when he was 70 years, 17days, and 12 hours old, one man supplied the answer in a minute and a half. When his questioners challenged his answer, he corrected them by pointing out that they had omitted to take into account leap years.

The man who demonstrated this astounding arithmetical ability was Thomas Fuller, the Virginia Calculator. Born in West Africa in 1710 and later shipped to America as a slave, he remained illiterate all his life.

There have been other lightning calculators. Some have not only lacked formal education but have been idiot savants, with little intellectual ability in other fields. Jedediah Buxton, another prodigy of the 18^th century, could remember for a period of at least a month the calculations needed to solve a complex arithmetical problem. Yet he remained illiterate, in spite of having a schoolteacher father, and seemed to have little intellectual inclination apart from his fascination for figures. On the one occasion that he attended a Shakespearean play, the only things that interested him were the number of words that each actor spoke and the number of entrances and exits each made.

Vito Mangiamele, son of a Sicilian shepherd, was a 19^th century arithmetical wonder with a limited education. In less than a minute he could tell a question that the cube root of 3,796,416 was 156. (The larger number is equal to 156 X 156 X 156.) this he did as a child of 10, under examination before the French Academy of Sciences. Even more amazingly, he was able to calculate the 10^th root of 282,475,249 in his head. (The answer is 7.)

Some calculating prodigies have been gifted mathematicians. Carl Friedrich Gauss, who was born in 1777, was one of the world’s most remarkable mathematical geniuses. His brilliant aptitude for figures was evident from an early age. On his first day in an arithmetic class at school he provided the answers to a series of problems before the teacher had finished dictating them. He published his theory of numbers in 1801 and later became a foremost mathematician of his age.

Born in 1887, Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician with extraordinary abilities in manipulating numbers. On one occasion his fellow mathematician G.H.Hardy recalled the time that he visited Ramanujan in the hospital. Hardy said that his taxicab had the number 1729, and remarked that it was a very dull number.

Ramanujan instantly replied that it was in fact very interesting: it was the smallest number that could be expressed as the sum of two cubes and in two different ways (as 12 cubed plus 1 cubed or as 10 cubed plus 9 cubed).

Such calculating geniuses have sometimes been of service to mathematicians as “human computers.” One 19^th century prodigy, Zacharias Dase, could multiply 100-digit numbers together mentally and create mathematical tables with the greatest of ease. Yet Dase was not able to comprehend even the most rudimentary of mathematical formulas. The Hamburg Academy of Sciences gave him financial support to create further mathematical tables that would shorten the labours of his fellow mathematicians and scientists.

Lightning calculators have not been able to explain their gifts, but they seem to share some common traits. When confronted with numerical calculations, they possess exceptionally capacious memories and demonstrate remarkably rapid recall. Such arithmetical ability enables them to carry out complicated calculations without pen or paper and remember the results for use in future problems

It seems that most have been left-handed. Left-handed people rely more on the right hemisphere of the brain, which controls spatial judgment, perception, intuition, and artistic ability. Perhaps the secret of the lightning calculators lies there.