Mental calculator

A mental calculator or human calculator is a person with a prodigious ability in some area of mental calculation (such as adding, subtracting, multiplying or dividing large numbers).

In 2005, a group of researchers led by Michael W. O'Boyle, an American psychologist previously working in Australia and now at Texas Tech University, has used MRI scanning of blood flow during mental operation in computational prodigies. These math prodigies have shown increases in blood flow to parts of the brain responsible for mathematical operations during a mental rotation task that are greater than the typical increases.^[1]

Mental calculators were in great demand in research centers such as CERN before the advent of modern electronic calculators and computers. See, for instance, Steven B. Smith's 1983 book The Great Mental Calculators, or the 2016 book Hidden Figures^[2] and the film adapted from it.

^ O'Boyle, Michael W.; et al. (October 2005). "Mathematically gifted male adolescents activate a unique brain network during mental rotation". Cognitive Brain Research. 25 (2). Amsterdam: Elsevier: 583–587. doi:10.1016/j.cogbrainres.2005.08.004. PMID 16150579.
^ Shetterly, Margot Lee (2016). Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race. William Morrow and Company. pp. 115. ISBN 978-0062363596. Some of the women were capable of lightning-fast mental math, rivaling their mechanical calculating machines for speed and accuracy. Others, like Dorothy Hoover and Doris Cohen, had highly refined understandings of theoretical math, differentiating their way through nested equations ten pages deep with nary an error in sign. The best of the women made names for themselves for accuracy, speed, and insight.

[1] O'Boyle, Michael W.; et al. (October 2005). "Mathematically gifted male adolescents activate a unique brain network during mental rotation". Cognitive Brain Research. 25 (2). Amsterdam: Elsevier: 583–587. doi:10.1016/j.cogbrainres.2005.08.004. PMID 16150579.

[2] Shetterly, Margot Lee (2016). Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race. William Morrow and Company. pp. 115. ISBN 978-0062363596. Some of the women were capable of lightning-fast mental math, rivaling their mechanical calculating machines for speed and accuracy. Others, like Dorothy Hoover and Doris Cohen, had highly refined understandings of theoretical math, differentiating their way through nested equations ten pages deep with nary an error in sign. The best of the women made names for themselves for accuracy, speed, and insight.

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