At ZME Science, Rupendra Brahambhatt reports on a teen who is “the world’s fastest ‘human calculator’”:

If I asked you to multiply 51,689 by 89,542 without using your phone or calculator, how much time would it take you? Fourteen-year-old Aaryan Shukla can solve this arithmetic in a matter of seconds—without even using a pen and paper. His mind races through numbers faster than most people can punch them into a calculator

Here’s something even crazier: Aaryan can mentally add 100 four-digit numbers in just about 30 seconds. Even if you’re a lightning-fast typist, just entering those numbers would take at least a couple of minutes. So how does Aaryan do it? “Meet the Indian Teen Who Can Add 100 Numbers in 30 Second and Broke 6 Guinness World Records for Mental Math,” April 28, 2025

At a recent contest in Dubai, Shukla broke six records in one day.

So how does he do it? It’s not a genetic endowment; Brahambhatt tells us that his relatives do not have outstanding math skills. We are told that he practices and follows a disciplined lifestyle but those ordinary methods of nurturing talent do not account for extraordinary ability.

Five years ago, another mental calculation genius hit the news. At the BBC, Mandish Pandey reported on Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash, then 20, who won India’s first gold in the mental calculation world championships.

His story is quite different:

You might think he was born a maths genius, but that’s not the case for Bhanu.

It was an accident when he was five which left him bedridden with a head injury for a year that sparked his amazing maths journey.

“My parents were told I might be cognitively impaired. “So I picked up mental maths calculations for survival, to keep my brain engaged.” “Aged 20 and the fastest human calculator in the world,” August 24, 2020

Prakash’s humility is commendable but most people who skirt brain damage don’t go on to win gold in math championships.

With calculation skills, as with photographic memory (highly superior autobiographical memory), we really don’t know, at present, how those so gifted do it.

You may also wish to read: Ever wish you had total recall? Ask people who do… Recall of every detail of one’s past works out better for some people than for others. Just why some people can recall almost everything that happened to them is a mystery in neuroscience, in part because they are few in number.