Daniel Tammet is
the author of three books, “Born
on a Blue Day” , “Embracing the wide sky” and “Thinking
in Numbers” , Daniel Tammet, suffers from “high-functioning autistic savant
syndrome”. For him, everything from Shakespeare to snowflakes makes him think
about numbers. The Brothers Grimm story about the magic pot of eternal porridge
sends him into a discussion of the nature of infinity. Proverbs remind him of
the times tables. A discussion of rhetoric leads to Pythagoras. He was born with congenital childhood
epilepsy. Experiencing numbers as colors or sensations is a well-documented
form of synesthesia, but the detail and specificity of Tammet's mental imagery
of numbers is unique. In his mind, he says, each number up to 10,000 has its
own unique shape and feel, that he can "see" results of calculations
as landscapes, and that he can "sense" whether a number is prime or
composite. He has described his visual image of 289 as particularly ugly, 333
as particularly attractive, and pi as beautiful. Tammet not only verbally
describes these visions, but also creates artwork, particularly watercolor
paintings, such as his painting of Pi.
“Savantism” which he was suffering with is a rare condition
in which people with 'developmental delays' of the brain (notably autism
spectrum), and/or brain injury, demonstrate profound and prodigious capacities
and/or abilities far in excess of those considered normal. He is also familiar with a number of foreign languages,
including French, Finnish, German, Spanish, Lithuanian, Romanian, Estonian,
Icelandic, Welsh and Esperanto, as well as his own invented language,
"Mänti", which has about 1,000 words.Tammet learned Icelandic in a
week, in front of the cameras. The culmination of the challenge was a live
interview on Icelandic TV, which he coped with brilliantly. Tammet set a European record on March
14, 2004, when he recited the mathematical constant pi (3.141...)
to 22,514 decimal places from memory in a time of 5 hours, 9 minutes. Tammet shows how mathematical proofs mirrored the use of
reasoning in law. We learn how a nine-year-old coined the term for the number 1
followed by 100 zeros – "googol", inspiration for the ubiquitous
search engine's monicker. He also surveys the likelihood of life on other
planets as viewed by mathematicians and astronomers.