[New-Poetry] also:

[Anny Ballardini]

Fascinating.

On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 4:59 PM, Halvard Johnson <halvard at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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!
>>
>
>
>
> --
>
> Halvard Johnson
> ================
> halvard at gmail.com
> http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html<http://home.earthlink.net/%7Ehalvard/index.html>
> http://entropyandme.blogspot.com
> http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com
> http://www.hamiltonstone.org
> http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html<http://home.earthlink.net/%7Ehalvard/vidalocabooks.html>
>
>
>
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