VP lauds Hyderabad man who won ‘world’s fastest human calculator’ title

New Delhi, August 26

Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu on Wednesday praised Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash for winning the “world’s fastest human calculator” title.

Prakash clinched the first-ever gold for India in the Mental Calculation World Championship at Mind Sports Olympiad held in London recently, the vice president noted.

Prakash (20) is from Hyderabad. “He has done India proud. My best wishes to him for all future endeavours,” the Vice President Secretariat tweeted quoting Naidu.

The tweet was posted with the hashtag ‘Human Calculator’.

Prakash, a math prodigy, who holds the fastest human calculator in the world record, had done the nation proud, winning the gold medal at the Mind Sports Olympiad (MSO) in London.

As the country celebrated its 74th Independence Day, Prakash, pursuing Mathematics (Hons) at St Stephens College in New Delhi, beat 29 competitors, up to 57 years of age, from 13 countries, to emerge the winner in the Mental Calculation World Championship at London on August 15.

The MSO is the most prestigious international competition for games of mental skill and mind sports held annually and equivalent to any other Olympic event in the realm of physical sports and he was the first Indian to bag the gold medal in the event, Prakash told PTI.

According to the MSO website, it is an international event with over 60 different board game competitions ranging from classics like Chess, Scrabble and unique events, including over a dozen world championships such as Memory, Mental Calculations and Creative Thinking.

Known as Bhanu, the maths prodigy said he holds four records for being the “fastest human calculator in the world”, having eclipsed records which were once held by highly acclaimed mathematicians.

According to him, the judges, who were fascinated by his speed, asked him to perform more calculations to confirm his accuracy, which he proved with élan.

On his future plans, the youth, whose parents own a small scale food manufacturing enterprise, said he wanted to eradicate maths phobia prevalent among students, mainly in the rural and underprivileged communities.

Bhanu rued there were no significant programmes to increase mathematical abilities and numeracy in the country and said he would like to create math labs, reach out to millions of children, under what he called VISION Math, to make them love math and arithmetic calculations.

Exploring Infinities, a start-up run by him, is a math education partner of T-SAT the education channel of the Telangana government.

The startup aims at developing cognitive abilities in children through arithmetic learning using an edutech app, which Bhanu says, will banish maths phobia of classes I-XII students by making brain workouts a popular culture.

“We’re looking for investments from VCs (venture capitalists) to make it big, in the Indian context,” he added. — PTI