"Nobody challenges me. I challenge myself."

I recently learned of a Hindu film profiling Shakuntala Devi – an Indian writer and mathematician, popularly known as “the human computer” (if you’re interested, it’s streaming on Amazon Prime and called Shakuntala Devi). She was considered a gifted child, and her math skills eventually gave her a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. The math problem that got her there? She demonstrated the multiplication of two 13-digit numbers (7,686,369,774,870 × 2,465,099,745,779) in her head in just 28 seconds.

As a pre-schooler, she could memorize an entire deck of cards from beginning to end. At the age of 5, she was extracting cube roots in her head. She could tell the day of the week that someone was born seconds after learning their birth date. In her early years, she famously solved a tough mathematical problem 10 seconds before the fastest computer at the time.

“Nobody challenges me. I challenge myself.” – Shakuntala Devi

You might think that Devi spent huge amounts of time with a math tutor, and advanced math classes. But the truth is that her father noticed her incredible talent while he was a circus performer – a trapeze artist, lion tamer, and magician. He saw his daughter’s math skills while teaching her a card trick at the age of 3. Her father worked with her tirelessly, while continuing to showcase her amazing memorization skills across India, and eventually the globe. Devi may have been naturally gifted, yes – but she would not have become the force that she did without a dedication to her practice and an immense joy in numbers themselves. We often want our students to succeed so much, that we forget about that playfulness piece. Devi was enamored by numbers – they were like a second language to her, and they could be found anywhere. What stimulated that curiosity? What led to her intense enjoyment of numbers? And was it just luck that led her to be born to a circus performer, who could hone that skill into a talent that was broadcast to the world?

More importantly, how do we teach it? How do we balance a desire to keep students engaged, excited and thrilled to learn, while continually challenging them and teaching them the next thing? It’s something our ~200 teachers grapple with daily, trying to bring the most out of our 6,000 students so that they can reach their full potential.

-Reshma