Daniel Tammet

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Daniel Tammet at Reykjavík University

Daniel Paul Tammet (born January 31, 1979 in London ) is a British "savant", a person with a so-called island talent . He has the ability to solve math problems and calculations extremely quickly and to display the results with up to a hundred decimal places. In addition, he showed in a test that he could learn a previously unfamiliar language - Icelandic - within a week.

Life

Daniel Tammet was born in 1979 in London as one of nine children. He is one of the few savants who did not have their abilities from birth, a so-called "acquired savant". Tammet had a severe epileptic seizure when she was three years old . This attack changed him permanently. He started reading math books and studying plant patterns. He manages to solve difficult arithmetic problems with mental arithmetic and has learned the Icelandic language enough within a week for the TV documentary The Boy With the Incredible Brain, produced in 2005 , that he was able to give a TV interview in it. At the international Pi meeting in 2004, he set a new European record when he presented 22,514 decimal places of the circle number Pi in a memory competition within five hours . Just as most savants only achieve extraordinary things in one area and are unable to do some everyday things at all, Tammet, for example, has difficulties distinguishing left and right.

About half of the savants are autistic , and Tammet also claims to have Asperger's syndrome . What is particularly interesting for scientists is that, unlike most other autistic people, Tammet can report exactly what is going on in his imagination while, for example, calculating. He reports that when two numbers are multiplied, for example, they appear as two symbols that combine to form a new symbol - the result. In his mind, every number up to 10,000, according to him, has its own appearance. He described his visual image of the number 289 as particularly ugly, 333 as particularly attractive, and the circle number pi as beautiful.

Tammet speaks the languages English (mother tongue), French , Finnish , Estonian , Spanish , German , Lithuanian , Esperanto , Romanian , Welsh and Icelandic . He also designed a language called Mänti , whose grammar is similar to Finnish and Estonian. The name "Mänti" comes from the Finnish mänty , which means " pine ". Since pines always appear together, Tammet reminds them of a community.

In New York, Tammet met his partner, the one year younger southern French photographer Jérôme Tabet. Daniel Tammet lives in Paris.

criticism

In his bestselling book Moonwalking with Einstein , the American science journalist Joshua Foer criticizes Tammet fiercely and suspects that Tammet's achievement is solely due to the training of memory techniques. Among other things, Foer reports that Tammet withholds details about his memory performance in interviews and his books that do not fit his portrayal as a savant. In the TV documentary Brainman , for example, Tammet claims that he cannot remember names because of his autism. In 2000, however, he took part in the world championship in memory sports under his maiden name Daniel Corney and even won the discipline "remembering names and faces". At that time he wrote on his website that he owed his achievements to mnemonics and distributed an e-book on it. Only when he emphasized his savant syndrome in his external presentation did he delete these passages from his website, as can still be proven by means of web archives.

literature

  • Daniel Tammet: Born on a Blue Day . A Memoir of Asperger's and an Extraordinary Mind. Hodder & Stoughton, London 2006, ISBN 0-340-89974-3 (English).
    • German edition:
      Daniel Tammet: Elf is friendly and five is loud . A genius with autism explains his world. Patmos Verlag, Düsseldorf 2007, ISBN 978-3-491-42108-0 .
  • Daniel Tammet: Cloud Jumper. Learn from a genius with autism . Patmos Verlag, Düsseldorf 2009, ISBN 978-3-491-42116-5 .
  • The poetry of the prime numbers. Translated by Dagmar Mallett. Hanser Verlag, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-446-43877-4 .
  • Daniel Tammet: Embracing the Wide Sky . A Tour Across the Horizons of the Human Mind. Hodder & Stoughton, London 2009, ISBN 0-340-96132-5 (English).
  • Daniel Tammet: Thinking in Numbers . How Maths Illuminates Our Lives. Hodder & Stoughton, London 2012, ISBN 1-4447-3740-6 (English).
  • Daniel Tammet: Mishenka . Editions les Arènes, Paris 2016, ISBN 2-35204-497-9 (French).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Biography of Daniel Tammet
  2. ↑ Hanser Verlag / press release on the new publication "The Poetry of Prime Numbers"
  3. ↑ Joshua Foer: Moonwalking with Einstein. Penguin Books.
  4. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from January 10, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed January 10, 2016 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.memocamp.com
  5. ↑ Daniel Tämmet. In: www.danieltammet.com. Archived from the original on May 9, 2001 ; accessed on January 10, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Tammet, Daniel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Tammet, Daniel Paul (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British savant
DATE OF BIRTH January 31, 1979
PLACE OF BIRTH London