Igor Alexeyevich Shelushkov (born – ?) was a
Soviet mental calculator. He mentally extracted
roots
A root is the part of a plant, generally underground, that anchors the plant body, and absorbs and stores water and nutrients.
Root or roots may also refer to:
Art, entertainment, and media
* ''The Root'' (magazine), an online magazine focusing ...
of large numbers and calculated the number of syllables and characters in a given verse by listening. Shelushkov was featured in the 1968 Soviet
popular science
''Popular Science'' (also known as ''PopSci'') is an American digital magazine carrying popular science content, which refers to articles for the general reader on science and technology subjects. ''Popular Science'' has won over 58 awards, incl ...
film ''Seven Steps Beyond the Horizon'', where he mentally extracted the sixth root of a 12-digit number and the 77th root of another multi-digit number. Shelushkov also competed with the Soviet
third generation computer
Third or 3rd may refer to:
Numbers
* 3rd, the ordinal form of the cardinal number 3
* , a fraction of one third
* 1⁄60 of a ''second'', or 1⁄3600 of a ''minute''
Places
* 3rd Street (disambiguation)
* Third Avenue (disambiguation)
* Hig ...
Mir. He extracted the 77th root of a 148-digit number in 18 seconds, while it took about 10 minutes to program the related operation for computer.
Shelushkov was a postgraduate at Gorki Polytechnic Institute (now
Nizhny Novgorod State Technical University). According to Shelushkov, he used the memorized
logarithmic table for calculations.
His abilities were mentioned by Russian mathematician Vladimir Tvorogov, who attended one of his performances,
and by psychologist Artur Petrovsky. Shelushkov's subsequent fate is unclear.
References
Mental calculators
Soviet mathematicians
Year of birth uncertain
1940s births
Living people
{{mathematician-stub