On November 23, 2004, Gert
Mittring, a 38-year-old German who struggled to pass
his school exams, set a world record for mentally calculating the 13th
root of this hundred-digit number randomly selected by the Director of
the Mathematics Museum at Giessen, near Frankfurt.
Mittring needed only 11.8 seconds to give the answer! (Sudents may want to try this on a calculator using a stopwatch.) Today Dr. Mittring lives in Carinthia,
Austria where he runs a school
for highly gifted children who disappoint their teachers in school.
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