Mad Maths
December 13th, 2007at 11:16am Posted by Eli
This is… rather remarkable:
Alexis Lemaire used brain power alone to work out the answer to the 13th root of a random 200-digit number in 70.2 seconds at London’s Science Museum.
The 27-year-old student correctly calculated an answer of 2,407,899,893,032,210, beating his record of 72.4 seconds, set in 2004.
(…)
Jane Wess, curator of mathematics at the London Science Museum said: “He sat down and it was all very quiet – and all of a sudden he amazingly just cracked it.
“It’s quite remarkable to see it happen. A very small number of people have this extraordinary ability.
“I believe that it is the highest sum calculated mentally.”
For those of you who are not math-heads, the 13th root is the number that, when raised to the 13th power, yields the original 200-digit number. So it’s like a square root on steroids and PCP. Perhaps Mr. Lemaire was bitten by a radioactive arachnid, so that his brain now has the proportional processing power of a spider. Yes, I’m sure that’s probably it.
(Spidermath, Spidermath, solves whatever a spider… canth
Finds the root, any size, if there were one he’d win the prize
Chalk out, here comes the Spidermaaaath…)
