[New-Poetry] also:

[Halvard Johnson]

I don't recall the savant's name (I don't think it was this guy), but he was
featured in (I believe) a PBS program a couple years ago, and he recited pi
for something like 24 hours with alternating teams of math guys checking
him. It wasn't exactly that he recited from memory, but apparently the
numbers just kept swimming up at him in visual form. He too had a weird
relationship with numbers. E.g., when he saw tall buildings (as in NYC) they
took the shape of the number 9.

Hal

On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 5:47 AM, Anny Ballardini
<anny.ballardini at gmail.com>wrote:

> Today is the 30th birthday of the man who holds the European record for
> reciting pi from memory, *Daniel Paul Tammet<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,dpta,dv,j736,4dvi,3hrs,fxvj>
> *. (books by this author<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,dpta,dv,ecu,gmzk,3hrs,fxvj>)
> It took him five hours and nine minutes to recite 22,514 digits of pi (the
> number that begins 3.14).
>
> He was born in London in 1979, and he grew up autistic, epileptic, and with
> synesthesia, a rare condition in which a person has unique sensory
> experiences. He wrote a memoir called *Born on a Blue Day: Inside the
> Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant* (2007). It begins, "I was born
> on January 31, 1979 — a Wednesday. I know it was a Wednesday, because the
> date is blue in my mind and Wednesdays are always blue, like the number 9 or
> the sound of loud voices arguing."
>
> Tammet describes synesthesia as "a visual, emotional experience of numbers,
> a neurological mixing of the senses, which most commonly results in the
> ability to see alphabetical letters and/or numbers in color." Vladimir
> Nabokov was also a synesthete, and documented his perspectives and
> experiences in the memoir *Speak, Memory*.
>
> Daniel Tammet said, "Numbers are my friends, and they are always around me.
> Each one is unique and has its own personality."
>
>
> --
> Anny Ballardini
> http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
> http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
> http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html
> I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing
> star!
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>
>


-- 

Halvard Johnson
================
halvard at gmail.com
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html
http://entropyandme.blogspot.com
http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com
http://www.hamiltonstone.org
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090131/065b0b78/attachment.html