Įager to escape the mounting antisemitism of 1930s Europe, von Neumann took a position at Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Study, where some dude named Albert Einstein was also a professor. Far from her machine-like nickname, Devi was an outgoing and warm person. She did it in 28 seconds, including the time required to write out the 26-digit solution. In 1980, her fame was immortalized when she made the Guinness World Records for the fastest multiplication of two 13-digit numbers. But one of her most memorable feats was in 1977, when she calculated the 23rd root of a 201-digit number in 50 seconds, beating a Univac computer (an early computer) by 12 seconds. Another favorite trick was identifying the day of the week for any date in history. Her specialty was cube roots, which she could find for numbers in the trillions in a matter of seconds. She toured all over India and the world while growing up. And before long, the crowds came just to see Devi, with her father taking on a new role as her manager. By the time she was 6, she was performing regularly as part of her father's magic show, doing card tricks and calculations. (Fischer won.) His legacy stands as America's greatest chess champion and tragic reminder of the price of genius.ĭevi fell for numbers the way that other toddlers love toys and crayons.
Later in life, he would disappear for years at a time and occasionally show up at international tournaments.įischer died in exile in Iceland at 64 years old, a fugitive from American officials for playing an unsanctioned chess tournament in Yugoslavia against Spassky for $5 million in 1992. He joined the fringe Worldwide Church of God in his early 20s and was drawn to conspiracy theories about a global Jewish cabal. īy the time he faced Spassky in 1972, the 30-year-old Fischer had grown paranoid, accusing opponents of trying to poison him.
As a teen, he obsessed over chess every waking hour, pouring through the archives at New York City's Marshall Chess Club to replay thousands of old games and develop new strategies. With a reported IQ of 181, Fischer was bored and restless in school, dropping out of high school at 16. Sadly, Fischer's preternatural genius at chess came at a cost to his personal life. But the match that cemented Fischer as America's first - and arguably its only - bona fide chess superstar was his much-hyped trouncing of the Soviet chess master Boris Spassky in 1972 to become the reigning world chess champion.
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