Remember when your teachers used to say that mental math is important because you can’t walk around with a calculator everywhere you go? Never minding the fact that we now do, actually, take a calculator everywhere we go (hello, smartphones), a teenager from India has taken it a step further: He has essentially become a human calculator.
Fourteen-year-old Aaryan Shukla cruised through six mental math calculation world records in a single day, according to a Guinness World Records statement published on February 12, earning the well-deserved nickname, “human calculator kid.”
“This ‘human calculator’ could probably do mental maths quicker than you could type it into your calculator,” Guinness World Records spokesperson Vassiliki Bakogianni wrote in the statement.
Specifically, it took Shukla:
- 30.9 seconds to mentally add 100 four-digit numbers
- One minute and 9.68 seconds to mentally add 200 four-digit numbers
- 18.71 seconds to mentally add 50 five-digit numbers
- Five minutes and 42 seconds to mentally divide a 20-digit number by a ten-digit number ten times
- 51.69 seconds to mentally multiply two five-digit numbers ten times
- Two minutes and 35.41 seconds to mentally multiply two eight-digit numbers ten times
According to the statement, these are among the most difficult mental calculation world records ever attempted. Shukla’s frankly mind-boggling achievement also comes in the wake of another world record he broke in April 2024 at the age of 13: fastest time to mentally add 50 five-digit numbers.
It took him just 25.19 seconds. That’s an addition every half a second. I wouldn’t be surprised if students seeking “shortcuts” in their math homework started phoning up Shukla instead of reaching for their ChatGPT browser tab.
“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,” he said in the statement. “Basically, it’s so fast that you can’t think, you just need to do the calculations.”
Shukla’s mother said that her son demonstrated mental math skills at a very young (or shall we say younger) age: “At the age of eight we went for an international competition and he won medals and trophies, which were great achievements,” she explained. Shukla’s father also pointed out that mental math doesn’t run in the family.
However, while it might seem like sheer, unique talent, there’s a lot of hard work that goes into Shukla’s achievements.
“Daily practice is one of the important aspects to prepare for competitions, […] so I practise for about five or six hours daily,” he explained. On top of that, Shukla also has school responsibilities, practices Sahaja Yoga meditation to “keep calm and focused,” and enjoys reading, playing video games, playing cricket, and traveling.
Aaryan is a world champion, a founding board member of the Global Mental Calculators Association (GMCA), and, in his father’s words, “a one in a billion kind of person.”
