She is dubbed as the world's fastest 'human computer' who made complex mental calculations.
Born on November 4, 1929, in Bangalore, to an orthodox priestly Brahmin family Devi had no access to proper schooling and food in her early years.
When she was only three, Devi began showing great affinity with numbers. By the time she was five, she became an expert in solving complex mental arithmetic.
Credited with solving some frightfully complicated arithmetic problems with apparent ease and astonishing speed, Shakuntala Devi's calculating skills stunned the world throughout the 1970s and 80s. Her sharpness often made sophisticated digital devices seem inadequate.
Shakuntala Devi figured in the Guiness Book of World Record for heroutstanding ability and wrote numerous books like 'Fun with Numbers', 'Astrology for You', 'Puzzles to Puzzle You', and 'Mathablit'.
At the age of six, she demonstrated her calculation skills in her first major public performance at the University of Mysore and two years later, she again proved herself successful as a child prodigy at Annamalai University.
In 1977, Shakuntala 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.
Rated as one in 58 million for her stupendous mathematical feats by one of the fastest super-computers ever invented, the Univac-1108, Devi believed in using grey cells to silicon chips.
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.
Shakuntala Devi died at Bangalore Hospital at 8:15am on April 21, 2013 at the age of 83. She was admitted to the hospital with respiratory difficulty, following which she acquired heart problems and endured a heart attack which proved fatal.
Today Google pays tribute to the mathematics wizard with a doodle.
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