‘I’m the fastest human calculator’: Scott Flansburg, 55, Scottsdale, Arizona, America
‘Say a number, any number…’ Scott Flansburg.
‘Say a number, any number’: Scott Flansburg
Pick a date, any day in your life, and I can tell you what day of the week it was. Say a number, any number, and I can multiply it all day. I’m a Guinness World Record holder – the fastest human calculator. I’ve held the title for more than 20 years.

I was just a regular nine-year-old pupil when my teacher wrote a list of two-digit numbers for the class to add together. My teacher could tell I wasn’t paying attention as she explained how numbers are carried over, so she decided to make an example of me by picking me out and sending me up to the board. The standard way to find the total of lots of numbers is to line them up and work downwards right to left, if you can remember. But I assumed that you could do it in the same way you read a sentence – from left to right – and found I could.

By the age of 10, my maths teachers were letting me come up with ideas rather than trying to teach me. I could see all these patterns and started discovering methods of multiplication that worked.

In the end I dropped out of high school. I never made it to college – I signed up to the Air Force instead. I served four years in Japan, and two in America. Then, in 1988, when my military supervisor’s son was struggling in school with maths, I was drafted in to help. I spent an evening showing the child some tricks and shortcuts, giving him a hand.

The next morning I got a call from his teacher: “Who are you,” they asked me, “and what have you done?”

I've had an MRI scan, the doctor said he'd never seen a brain like mine
Scott Flansburg
From then, things escalated pretty quickly. I started to speak to classes fairly often, and after a reporter saw my mathematical skills firsthand and filed a story, I was invited on to television – I did the rounds.

I’ve had an MRI scan. The doctor said he’d never seen a brain like mine. It’s almost as if it has a different set of wires. There’s a part of the brain called Brodmann area 44, or BA44, and mine is naturally four times the normal size. I’ve met a few other people with similar abilities at competitions: Yusnier Viera, Gerald Newport and Lee Jeonghee.