Alex's Adventures in Numberland - Alex Bellos [57]
CHAPTER FOUR
Life of Pi
In the early nineteenth century, news of boy wonder George Parker Bidder, the son of a Devonshire stonemason, reached the ears of Queen Charlotte. She had a question for him:
‘From the Land’s-end, Cornwall, to Farret’s-head, in Scotland, is found by measurement to be 838 miles; how long would a snail be creeping that distance, at the rate of 8 feet per day?’
The exchange and the answer – 553,080 days – is mentioned in a popular book of the time, A short Account of George Bidder, the celebrated Mental Calculator: with a Variety of the most difficult Questions, Proposed to him at the principal Towns in the Kingdom, and his surprising rapid Answers! The pages list the child’s greatest calculations, including such classics as ‘What is the square root of 119,550,669,121?’ (345,761, answered in half a minute) and ‘How many pounds weight of sugar are there in 232 hogsheads, each weighing 12cwt. 1qr. 22lbs?’ (323,408lbs, also answered in half a minute.)
Arabic numerals made doing sums easier for everyone, but an unexpected consequence was the discovery that certain people were blessed with truly astonishing arithmetical skills. Often, these prodigies excelled in no other way than their facility with numbers. One of the earliest-known examples was a Derbyshire farmhand, Jedediah Buxton, who amazed locals with his abilities in multiplication despite being barely able to read. He could, for example, calculate the value of a farthing when doubled 140 times. (The answer is 39 digits long, with 2 shillings 8 pence left over.) In 1754, curiosity about Buxton’s talent led to him being invited to visit London, where he was examined by members of the Royal Society. He seems to have had some of the symptoms of high-functioning autism, for when he was taken to see Shakespeare’s Richard III he was left nonplussed by the experience, although he notified his hosts that the actors had taken 5202 steps and spoken 14,445 words.
In the nineteenth century ‘lightning calculators’ were international stage stars. Some showed aptitude at an extraordinarily young age. Zerah Colburn, from Vermont, was five when he gave his first public demonstration and eight when he sailed to England with dreams of big-time success. (Colburn was born with hexadactyly, but it is not known if his extra fingers gave him an advantage when learning to count.) A contemporary of Colburn’s was the Devonshire lad George Parker Bidder. The two prodigies crossed paths in 1818, when Colburn was 14 and Bidder 12, and the encounter, in a London pub, inevitably led to a maths duel.
Colburn was asked how long it would take a balloon to circumnavigate the globe if the balloon were travelling at 3878 feet per minute and the world were 24,912 miles around. It was a suitably international question for the unofficial title of smartest alec on Earth. But after deliberating for nine minutes, Colburn failed to give an answer. A London newspaper gushed that his opponent, on the other hand, took only two minutes before giving the correct reply, ‘23 days, 13 hours and 18 minutes, [which] was received with marks of great applause. Many other questions were proposed to the American boy, all of which he refused answering; while young Bidder replied to all.’ In his charming autobiography, A memoir of Zerah Colburn, written by himself, the American gives a different version of the contest. ‘[Bidder] displayed great strength and power of mind in the higher branches of arithmetic,’ he said, before adding dismissively, ‘but he was unable to extract the roots, and find the factors of numbers.’ The mpionship was left