# Math Savant

### Staff: Mentor

Meet Daniel Tammet, a 27 year-old math and memory wizard. He can do things with numbers that will truly amaze you. He is a savant. . . with a difference. Unlike most savants, he shows no obvious mental disability, and most importantly, he can describe his own thought process. Join correspondent Morley Safer as he explores the extraordinary life and mind of Daniel Tammet.

The videos can be slow to play, be patient.

http://60minutes.yahoo.com/segment/44/brain_man

Last edited: Mar 2, 2007
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4. ### Kurdt

4,941
Staff Emeritus
Yeah this guy is good. And rather sexy if you're a lady and can stand a man with OCD

5. ### turbo

7,366
There is a difference between functional, intelligent, and smart. I know a lot of highly functional people who have neither the intelligence nor the smarts to roll with the punches in situations where intelligence and smarts are required and I know a hell of a lot of "intelligent" people who are not smart enough to ask for the creative help that can rescue them from failure when "smarts" are required.

If someone can spout numerical sequences or dates on command, they have a "gift". If someone can refer to texts, papers, etc, and come up with a workable solution to a problem, they have an adequate education. If another person can come in and evaluate the process and put their finger on WHY the engineered process is failing, they are a troubleshooter and are exhibiting "smarts". This is why industries pay serious money to proven talent. I cannot recite pi to x decimal places, but I have solved some very vexing ongoing production problems on paper machines, often within an hour or two, and often which have been costing the mills $10's of$K per day in downtime for many weeks.

6. ### Schrodinger's Dog

That's great I hope he'll make an impression on the world, the world needs clever people. The more the merrier.

7. ### JasonRox

2,327
I think we are aware of this.

Isually categorize it in two parts... street smart or book smart.

8. ### Cyrus

Well that last thread about worlds smartest man. He might be a bit nutty, but he is no doubt very very smart.

### Staff: Mentor

You mean besides the OCD and Autism, right? He's functional, but with some difficulty. Still, he's pretty amazing.

Last edited: Mar 3, 2007
10. ### larkspur

791
I know quite a few people who are book smart but life stupid.......

11. ### Schrodinger's Dog

The only thing that worries me is the number of Savants who ever make any sort of contribution to science, it just seems to be that the greatest scientific minds are not mentally incapacitated by autism or OCD, etc. So I worry that his genious for numbers will never get any practical applications.

12. ### moe darklight

411
lol, you just reminded me how a while ago my dad and I came up with this theory that intelligence and stupidity are completely independent of each other; that a person can have high levels of both... think about it: how many incredibly intelligent, yet incredibly stupid/ignorant people have you met? and how many not-intelligent yet not-stupid either people have you met?

the guy on the video is insane with numbers! holy cow! ... I like the part where he describes how he sees numbers as colors and shapes... maybe from a young age when he first started dealing with numbers his brain used the visual parts to understand them, or something like that... they should really do some scans of his brain while he's at work to learn more.

I'm going to try putting a shape and color to every number in my head and see if it helps me in any way (or the opposite)... I'll try it for a week it'll be a fun experiment :) ... I can see how it could help in memorizing numbers, I don't know how he uses it for doing calculations though... do the shapes and colors mix? ...

13. ### Kurdt

4,941
Staff Emeritus
Of course the visualisation of numbers is a good way of remembering them as the world memory champion (Dominic O'Brien) uses this technique for memorising decks of cards for example but he imagines a journey and each card corresponds to someone he meets. Its quite a hard technique to start off with but once you learn it the results speak for themselves. This guy obviously has a natural visualisation ability rather than having to learn it.

### Staff: Mentor

I changed the title from what the original news blurb had. I should have known people would get their feathers ruffled. :tongue2:

The guy has an uncanny math and memorization ability. He memorized a list of over 22,500 numbers in a couple of weeks and recited them back without a single mistake, it took him 5 hours to recite them all. That's freaking bizzarre.

Seeing numbers as colors would make him a synesthete.

And it's not just math, he learned conversational Icelandic in a week.

I'm sure they must be studying his brain.

15. ### turbo

7,366
He does have uncanny abilities - they seem to point to eidetic memory. His his ability to channel his talent to linguistics may have been aided by an ability to visually associate Icelandic words with English ones. I am not familiar with Icelandic, but if sentences can be structured grammatically using common rules for English, having an eidetic Icelandic/English dictionary in your brain would get you most of the way there.

Last edited: Mar 3, 2007
16. ### tehno

363
Just a huge memorizing ability!

From the title of the thread and this post it is obvious that you don't know what math is.What he is doing isn't math at all.
Capability of memorizing 22,500 numbers or even to perform accurate calculations as fast as a digital calculator is something else,not an extraordinary math talent.Matter of fact some savants are known for their skills of finding huge primes without knowing how to solve very simple (elementary school) math problems.
Good illustration is the movie ˝Rain Man˝.
Thanks for bringing up this subject ,however.
I find it very interesting.One more example of how great the mystery of a human mind is.

17. ### Curious3141

2,970
I think you're being unduly harsh on Evo. There are many aspects to mathematical ability. Certainly, rapidity in arithmetic calculations counts, because arithmetic is a subset of mathematics. Memory for numbers (numerical memory) can be similarly justified as mathematical proficiency, because numerals are indeed mathematical constructs.

He may lack extraordinary ability in mathematical abstraction, which is what you may consider to be "true mathematical ability" but that doesn't mean that what he is capable of should be considered non-mathematical.

18. ### Kurdt

4,941
Staff Emeritus
He does speak many other languages as well with grammar structures completely different to that of English.

19. ### tehno

363
How much?Haven't seen "Rain Main" movie ha?

BTW, "arithmetic is a subset of mathematics" is very brilliant definition of arithmetics.I beleive mathematicians would be very satisfied with it

20. ### Kurdt

4,941
Staff Emeritus
I think if you're going to have this argument tehno should define his terms, more specifically mathematics.

21. ### tehno

363
I will not define it.I don't know what mathematics is.Do you?
Perhaps,I'm ignorant or just dumb but I don't know how even set should be rigorously defined .