And why is she on a calculator?
Oh wait, that’s not Helen Thomas. I apologize for the insult.
A calculated effort today for the #humancomputer #ShakuntalaDevi‘s 84th birthday pic.twitter.com/ObrU1yRC1X
— Google Doodles (@GoogleDoodles) November 4, 2013
The company logo on Google’s homepage today resembles a calculator display in honor of Shakuntala Devi, mental calculator also known as the “Human Computer”.
Born in Bangalore, India on November 4, 1929, Devi had the ability to memorize numbers and perform complex calculations from an early age. She toured the world demonstrating her capabilities in the 1950s and 1970s, and won several contests against a computer, including being the quicker to calculate the cube root of 188,132,517.
She died earlier this year, so they can’t use her as a replacement for Healthcare.gov.
Devi may have been a human calculator, but you couldn’t make her multiply 14,502 times 4 and then turn her upside-down to spell “BOOBS,” sort of. Advantage: Science.