VIDEO: Scott Flansburg The Human Calculator

[Ryan Goble]

I saw a clip about this guy on Stan Lee's Superhumans and the clip there was way cooler as they did fMRI instead of the EEG.  The embedded clip does not explain the genetic mutation as clearly as the History Channel version (link below).

If you want to get a feel for this dude you can check this older clip from the Discovery Channel: 


I recommend checking the full episode of Stan Lee's Superhumans and starting at 19:00.

[Patrick Flynn]

another good one is Art Benjamin from Harvey Mudd college. Here is his talk on TED.

[Patrick Flynn]

http://www.ted.com/talks/arthur_benjamin_does_mathemagic.html

[Joshua Zucker]

Like they think 956 / 7 is hard?

Cube roots of perfect cubes is pretty easy too. Estimate the magnitude to find the first digit and then there's a 1-1 correspondence for the last digit. (Fifth roots are even easier!)

And repeated addition of 34? Give me a break. That's even an especially easy one since three of them is 102 so you can keep coming back to multiples of that as a landmark and then add two 34s.

How about giving him something actually hard, like squaring a four-digit number? He can do that stuff, too, so I wonder why they gave him such boring, easy material to work with. Anyone have a link to him doing something better?

Art is great for sure, and a real mathematician in addition to being a magician and a calculator.

[Ryan Goble]

your response is proof the the multiple intelligence theory - I, like most less gifted in the maths, would have never noticed :)