Shakuntala Devi was born in Bangalore, India, to a traditional Kannada Brahmin family. She was able to do this without any formal education. Devi’s father discovered her ability to memorize numbers while teaching her a card trick when she was about three years old. In 1944 Devi moved to London with her father. She returned to India in the mid-1960s and married Paritosh Bannerji, an officer of the Indian Administrative Service from Kolkata. She and her husband were divorced in 1979. Devi returned to Bangalore in the early 1980s.

Achievements

•   In 1977 in USA she competed with a computer to see who gives the cube root of 188,132,517 faster, she won. That same year, at the Southern Methodist University she was asked to give the 23rd root of a 201-digit number; she answered in 50 seconds. Her answer—546,372,891—was confirmed by calculations done at the U.S. Bureau of Standards by the Univac 1101 computer, for which a special program had to be written to perform such a large calculation.

•   On June 18, 1980, she demonstrated the multiplication of two 13-digit numbers 7,686,369,774,870 × 2,465,099,745,779 picked at random by the Computer Section of Imperial College, London. She properly answered 18,947,668,177,995,426,462,773,730 in 28 seconds.This event is described in the 1982 Guinness Book of Records.

Book on homosexuality

In 1977, she published the first study of homosexuality in India. In the documentary For Straights Only, she says that her interest in the topic came out of her marriage to a homosexual man, and subsequent desire to look at homosexuality more closely in order to comprehend it.

The book, considered “pioneering”, interviews two young Indian homosexual men, a male couple in Canada seeking legal marriage, a temple priest for his views on homosexuality, and contains a review of the existing materials on homosexuality. It ends with a call for decriminalising homosexuality, and “full and complete acceptance—not tolerance and not sympathy”. Based to Subhash Chandra’s review of Ana Garcia-Arroyo’s book The Construction of Queer Culture in India: Leaders and Landmarks,

For Garcia-Arroyo the beginning of the debate on homosexuality in the twentieth century is made with Shakuntala Devi’s book The World of Homosexuals released in 1977. [...] Shakuntala Devi’s (the famous mathematician) book appeared. This book went almost unnoticed, and did not lead to queer discourse or movement. [...] The reason for this book not making its mark was because Shakuntala Devi was famous for her mathematical magic and nothing of significant import in the field of homosexuality was expected from her. One more factor for the apathy meted out to the book could perhaps be a measured silence because the cultural situation in India was unfriendly for an open and intricate discussion on this issue.

Death

In April 2013, Devi was admitted to a hospital in Bangalore, India with respiratory problems. Over the following 2 weeks she sustained from problems of the heart and liver. Devi died in hospital on April 21, 2013. She was 83 years old.

Devi is lasted by her daughter, Anupama Banerji.