Aaryan Shukla can do mental maths quicker than you could type it into your calculator.
Last year, the math whizz from Maharashtra left a large audience speechless when he set the record for the fastest time to mentally add 50 five-digit numbers. He did that in a mere 25.19 seconds. Since then, Aaryan has been practising (for up to 6 hours per day), competing, doing yoga (to calm his mind) and pushing his limits.
Recently, Guinness World Records invited him to Dubai to take on some of the toughest mental calculation world records ever attempted. The prodigy was clearly on form as he achieved an impressive total of six records during the day, as follows:
Fastest time to mentally add 100 four-digit numbers - 30.9 sec
Fastest time to mentally add 200 four-digit numbers - 1 min 9.68 sec
Fastest time to mentally add 50 five-digit numbers - 18.71 sec
Fastest time to mentally divide a 20-digit number by a ten-digit number (set of ten) - 5 min 42 sec
Fastest time to mentally multiply two five-digit numbers (set of ten) - 51.69 sec
Fastest time to mentally multiply two eight-digit numbers (set of ten) - 2 min 35.41 sec
So, how does he do it? Well, he doesn't really know, saying: "A lot of things in mental calculations happen in a flash of a second, so I cannot say what happens inside my head... I just do it naturally. Basically, it’s so fast that you can’t think, you just need to do the calculations."
Perhaps surprisingly, his exceptional calculating skills don’t run in the family. His dad says: “We are a normal family. Aaryan is a one in a billion kind of person, but I don’t think that we are a family of mental calculators.”
Want to see him in action? Here's what he got up to in Dubai...