On March 14, 2004, which is celebrated as “Pi Day,” a bespectacled man stood calmly in an Oxford room, packed with spectators, who watched in awe as he recited Pi’s decimal numbers from his memory to 22,514 places, over a period of five hours and nine minutes, reported The New York Times. Daniel Tammet is known as a mathematical genius who thinks of numbers and words in terms of colors, shapes, textures, and emotions. For the rest of the world, numbers and words are just linguistic or mathematical elements, but for him, these are alive, physical objects with tangible structures and emotions. Tammet’s life is a strange concoction of ability and disability.
“The numbers are moving in my mind,” he told ABC News. “Sometimes they’re fast, sometimes they’re slow. Sometimes they’re dark. Sometimes they’re bright. That emotion, that motion, that texture will be highly memorable for me.” Tammet, who speaks nine languages, has a condition called ‘synesthesia,’ which blends the senses, giving birth to a kaleidoscopic yet heightened sensory reality.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, synesthesia is a condition in which the brain routes sensory information through multiple unrelated senses, causing the person to experience more than one sense simultaneously. This may look like someone ‘tasting words,’ ‘hearing colors‘ or ‘linking colors to numbers and letters.’ In Tammet’s case, he sees and feels numbers. His mind has a unique 3-dimensional shape with a unique color and texture for each digit. Number fifteen, for example, is white, yellow, lumpy and round, Tammet shares with the publication.
Tammet can produce answers to complex cube roots and complicated calculations in a matter of seconds without the aid of a calculator. For example, when asked to multiply 53 by 131, he explained the solution in shapes and textures: “Fifty-three, which is round, very round…and larger at the bottom. Then you’ve got another number 131, which is longer and a little bit like an hourglass. And there’s a space that’s created in between. That shape is the solution. 6,943!”
Tammet is the eldest of nine children in his family, living in England. He was only a child when he realized his brilliant mathematical genius. “I learned to count, like anyone else, at a young age, and when I did, I would see colors,” he told ABC News. “I would see pictures in my mind. I assumed at the time that everyone saw numbers as I did.”
His abilities were primarily heightened at the age of three, when he suffered a severe epileptic fit and seizure, per The Guardian. “When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That’s the answer. It’s mental imagery. It’s like maths without having to think,” he described. Since then, Tammet has penned several interesting books, including “Born on a Blue Day,” “Embracing the Wide Sky,” “How to be Normal,” “Every Word is a Bird We Teach to Sing,” and “Thinking in Numbers.” In a TED talk, he said that he usually likes to “explore the nature of perception” in his books, because perception is at the heart of how humans acquire knowledge and understand things.
He is a multilingual writer and also a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in France, as per Brut Media. Only about one hundred people in the world, including Tammet, are “prodigious savants” possessing such extraordinary mathematical abilities.
