I decided to research about Shakuntala Devi. One story that I found in multiple places was about her childhood. Her father was a circus performer and when she was only 3 he discovered her abilities for math. He recruited her to help with his card tricks. I was curious as to how her math skills helped with card tricks so I decided to look into that further. On this website I discovered that she also had a photographic memory. She memorized the order of the cards in the deck, then was able to guess a card. Also as part of her father's circus, she performed math problems in her head quickly. This was the beginning of her lifelong fame and performances as the "human calculator".
One other interesting tidbit that I learned was how much Devi saw math in her everyday life. This is expected of a mathematician, but I thought it was interesting to the extent that she saw math in our world. Besides seeing math in flowers and hearing it in birds chirping, she saw it on license plates. This website talks about how she would see a number on a license plate, then play with it. For example, when she saw the number 720 she came up with this: 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 equals 720.
