Daniel Tammet

"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"... -- Daniel Tammet

Last week, I finished reading an enjoyable and moving Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant -- a memoir book of Daniel Tammet. He's a 28 yr old Englishman diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a high functioning form of autism. That is, he has autistic symptoms but can function quite normally and independently compared to other autistic individuals such as Kim Peek on whom the movie Rainman was based.

The beauty to Daniel's high functioning condition is that he can explain how he thinks. And in fact it is beautiful. He says he "experiences" numbers and dates as colors, shapes, sounds and textures. The number 1 is bright like lightning, number 9 is tall like a skyscraper and Thursdays are fuzzy like fur. How beautiful indeed!

Daniel holds the European record for memorizing Pi up to 22,514 digits. He says that 22,500 was the agreed upon limit, so it seems likely he could've easily memorized thousands more digits if officials had requested.

The Discovery Channel had a really nice piece on him called Brainman, the highlight of which was when he journeyed to Utah to meet Kim Peek. He appeared on The David Letterman Show and described David as being the number 117 -- "tall and lanky". The show 60 Minutes also did a segment some time afterward, some videos of which can be found on youTube.

Finally, Daniel has set up his own website called Optimnem, on which I enjoy reading his blog.

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ps: Ages ago for our college dorm talent show, my friend and I memorized Pi up to 314 digits (or at least I'd like to think). We dressed up in grim reaper costumes, stood on opposite ends of the stage, and recited the digits in slow deep voices in unison. Didn't win, but got lots of laughs. Ahhhh, good times. :-) pi=3.14159 26535 89793 23846 26433 83279 50288 ...

pps: Other interesting links...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,1409903,00.html
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Books/story?id=2794451&page=1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Tammet