Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash
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A brief biography
As in 2020
Shradha Chettri, August 27, 2020: The Times of India
When asked why he prefers his mental ability to arrive at answers to complex mathematical problems when there is a calculator for such things, Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash nonchalantly replies, “Why does Usain Bolt run when he has a car?” And then he elaborates, “It’s simple. Exhibiting a global dominance in terms of physical achievement inspires a generation that wants to adopt Bolt’s way of life. That is what I want to do with mental maths from India.”
Prakash, a mathematics graduate of Delhi’s St Stephen’s College and a Hyderabad resident, may have just achieved what he has wanted to do since he was eight years old. At the age of 20, he is the “world’s fastest human calculator”. On August 15, he became the first Indian in the last 23 years to win a gold medal at the “Mental Calculation World Championship” in the Mind Sports Olympiad 2020 in London. This year, the event was held online.
Coming from a family that has no mathematician — his parents run a ketchup factory and are botany and genetics graduates and his younger sister is into fashion — Prakash is justifiably proud to have taken the crown with 167 points, with a Lebanese youth lagging in second place with 102. The competition had 30 participants, the oldest being a 57-year-old. At one point, Prakash was so accurate with division calculation that the organisers had to conduct a recheck of the decimal point he had given in his answer — and found to be correct.
“Mental calculation is not very popular, but we have geniuses such as Srinivas Ramanujan and Shakuntala Devi,” the feisty young man exulted on the phone from Hyderabad. “But in the post-modern world, there is none who has done what I have.”
Talking about his climb to the summit of the mathematical mountain, the Telangana youth said, “It all started when I was five years old. I had an accident and suffered a head injury. I was advised bed rest for a year, and had to stay away from school. That is when I became involved with mental maths and puzzles.”
His thirst for figures honed, he won his first trophy at the age of eight, when he ended fourth in a local competition. That was the stepping stone. He rose from state to zonal to national and international levels. He also has to his credits some record earlier held by Scott Flansburg and Shakuntala Devi. “Shakuntala Devi still holds the record for multiplication,” says Prakash. “However, I was able to break some others, like power multiplication, superfast addition and superfast substraction.”
But he is more than just a kid with a head for numbers. Even before graduation, Prakash had a start-up called Exploring Infinities, which aims at developing cognitive abilities in children through arithmetic learning. After 2016, he stopped participating in competitions and focused on his start-up, hopeful of ushering in social change.
Prakash knew his future lay in numbers. “My grandfather was an engineering dropout who later fot a commerce degree. Like him, I first joined IIIT to study computer science, but realised within a year that what I loved was mathematics,” Prakash says. “Since no one in the family was sure about this field, I had to take the traditional route and decided on St Stephen’s to guide my mathematical abilities.”
Having now graduated, he details his plans, “Success means a lot of things in the education sector. There are ripples to be created around how mathematics is an individual subject and sports can be promoted to get the mathematics phobia challenged,” says Prakash. “In the years to come I want to engage with corporate audiences, talk to adults and inculcate in them through a model some mathematical learning where people can do brain workouts. My other aim is policy change and the only way to push forward is through mathematical reform. Literacy and numeracy are two pillars of cognitive development.”
