Hans Eberstark

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Hans Eberstark (born January 27, 1929 in Vienna ; † December 19, 2001 ) was an Austrian linguist and mental calculator .

Eberstark came from a Jewish family of doctors in Vienna (Talmud scholars were also in the ancestral line). In 1937 the family fled to Shanghai via Trieste, where he stayed until 1947. He then returned to Vienna with his family and studied languages. He was a translator for the Nuremberg trials .

He spoke 20 languages ​​perfectly, including German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Hebrew (which he learned as a child), Yiddish, Norwegian, Danish, Albanian, Papiamento , Creole (Haiti), and Surinamese his favorite language , Sranantongo , on which he did his doctorate. In addition, he spoke many languages ​​such as Chinese at a level of communication and also hundreds of dialects such as Swiss German , which he was able to memorize after briefly listening to dialect speakers. He gave a taste of it at CERN in 1976.

He also emerged as a mental calculator, where he processes numbers based on acoustics. He set a world record in 1979 when he memorized 11,944 digits of the number pi . He was able to multiply written seven-digit numbers in his head in about a minute. He performed at the farewell event for Wim Klein at CERN , where he worked with him to multiply multi-digit numbers in his head, calculate the days of the week and memorize sequences of numbers.

He was a translator at the International Labor Office in Geneva and taught translation techniques at the University of Geneva . In the late 1960s he was one of the chairmen of the German-speaking canteen .

literature

  • Ida Fleiß: gifted and gifted. Tectum Verlag, Marburg 2003, p. 70

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64okP1EOgKY
  2. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1fuw2CRVYE , from about 37 min
  3. ↑ Source: Statutes of the Deutsche Mensa eV - 6 Frankfurt 50 - An der Ringmauer 134 as of 1968
personal data
SURNAME Boar strong, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian linguist and mental calculator
DATE OF BIRTH January 27, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH December 19, 2001