Mental calculator
From Free net encyclopedia
Mental calculators are people with a prodigious ability in some area of mental calculation, such as multiplying large numbers together or factoring large numbers. Some mental calculators are autistic savants, with a narrow area of great skill and poor mental development in other directions, but many are people of normal mental development who have simply developed advanced calculating ability. A good many are also experienced mathematicians, linguists, writers, and so on.
Mental calculators were in great demand in research centers such as CERN before the advent of modern electronic calculators and computers. See, for instance, the 1983 book The Great Mental Calculators, whose introduction was written by Hans Eberstark.
Michael O'Boyle, an American psychologist working in Australia, has recently utilized fMRI scanning of blood flow during mental operation in prodigies to display startling results. Mathematical prodigies achieve blood flow to parts of the brain responsible for mathematical operations six to seven times the typical flow.
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Mental calculators in fiction
In Dune, specially trained mental calculators known as Mentats have replaced mechanical computers completely. Several important supporting characters in the novel, namely Piter De Vries and Thufir Hawat, are Mentats.
Mental calculators
- Alexander Aitken (A. C. Aitken)
- Alexis Lemaire
- Arthur T. Benjamin, #21 "The 100 Greatest"
- Zacharias Dase
- Shakuntala Devi
- Pericles Diamandi, #23 in "The 100 Greatest"
- Urania Diamandi, #58 in "The 100 Greatest"
- Hans Eberstark
- Leonhard Euler
- Salo Finkelstein
- Rüdiger Gamm, de:Rüdiger Gamm
- Carl Friedrich Gauss
- Brian Greene
- Wim Klein (a.k.a. Willem Klein), #3 in "The 100 Greatest"
- John Law
- John Von Neumann
- Bernhard Riemann
- Jaime García Serrano, Colombia, Sea Usted Una Computadora Humana ISBN 9875610860
- Divesh Shah [1]
- Oleg Stepanov
- Jakow Trachtenberg
- Tathagat Avatar Tulsi
- Srinivasa Ramanujan
- Scott Flansburg, [2], [3]
- Kim Peek