Vikas Sharma Grabs Guinness World Record for Fastest Mental Calculations

HOUSTON: Vikas Sharma, 29 years, who is originally from Gurgaon, India and living in Houston for last 2 years has made into Guinness World Record for most number of mental calculations in 1 minute making him one of the fastest human calculator in the world. This feat has brought fame to India and Indians living in Houston and Worldwide.

In an event organized and supervised by IMA (International Mental Arithmetic) in Chennai, India on Jan 3,  he broke the existing Chinese record by doing 12 mental calculations in 1 minute comprising of 321 digits. Guinness officially accepted the record on January 22.

Vikas is works as a Solution Architect in ClickSoftware in Houston and have been pursuing mental mathematics as a hobby since last 14 years. Vikas’s first tryst with records began in 2009 when he entered the “India Book of Records” for devising a tabular method to find higher roots, using the method it was possible to calculate the cube root of any number up to 15-digit number in 50 seconds. Vikas, who plays cricket, write poems has also interest in finding universal patterns.

He started preparing for Guinness World Record a year ago. His wife Kirti Sharma, an interpreter of Japanese language, encouraged him by giving him bigger numbers to solve. Though techniques like abacus and Vedic mathematics inspired him to do calculations fast, he researched and devised his own method to work out problems. He plans to patent the method soon.

His personal record involves calculating the 50th root of a 51-digit number in less than a second which is faster than a scientific calculator and a computer. “The next step is to go up to 100 digits and calculate up to three decimal places”.

Despite Sharma’s obsession with mathematics, he did not miss out on any childhood experiences. “I see numbers as my friends. The more you investigate numbers the more they tell you”.