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Originally Posted by hoovesupsideyourhead
dunbar .on a side note ive found someone that may have your skills..hes a guy from england..he can run a dec point out on a calculation 22,000 spots in his head..it was on discovery tm lol science last night...
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hooves, I may be an idiot, but, unfortunately, I'm not a savant. My mental math skills are nothing special.
But that does remind me of a story I like. One of the top 20th C. mathematicians was a Brit named G.H.Hardy. Hardy discovered a mental phenom from India named Ramanujan, who had what can only be described as an amazing relationship with numbers. Hardy invited Ramanujan to England, where they collaborated on a number of papers. But Ramanujan was sickly, and spent a lot of time in the hospital. On one visit, Hardy found himself running out of things to talk about, so he said that the cab that brought him had a rather "dull" license plate, 1729. Without a moment's hesitation, Ramanujan responded, "No, Hardy, it is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways!"
Why, of course it is! Anyone can see that! Yeah, right.
Here's a link to where I got the exact quote:
Weisstein, Eric W. "Hardy-Ramanujan Number." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource.
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Hardy-RamanujanNumber.html
--Dunbar