Willem Klein

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Willem Klein , also Wim Klein , (born December 4, 1912 in Amsterdam ; † August 1, 1986 there ) was a Dutch mental calculator who went under the name Willie Wortel, Moos Optel or Pascal (after the inventor of the calculating machine Blaise Pascal ). He was the son of general practitioner Henri Klein and his wife Emma Cohen († 1929). Henri Klein had a practice in Amsterdam's Oosterparkbuurt.

Life

Even as a child, Willem Klein stood out for his talent for computing. Numbers already fascinated him at school. While others played soccer during their breaks, he factored the numbers up to 10,000. Already at the Vossius-Gymnasium, which he attended around 1928–1931, he received log tables from the teachers , which he then learned by heart.

He was studied as a child by the neurologist Berthold Stokvis together with his twin brother Leo, who was also a good mental calculator. It turned out that Wim was an auditory (acoustic-rhythmic-motor) mental calculator, while his brother Leo was a visual type. After graduating from high school in 1932, Win Klein performed in variety shows and at the circus , but also studied medicine in Amsterdam at the request of his father , since his father wanted a successor for his medical practice. In 1935 he took the candidate examination and in 1938 the first part of the doctoral examination. After his father died in 1937, he dropped out of medical school in late July 1938.

During the Second World War he first worked in a Jewish hospital (other hospitals were forbidden for Jews) and enrolled again at the University of Amsterdam, where he took the second part of the doctoral examination in 1941. As of 1942, however, he had to hide as a Jew - his brother Leo was caught in a raid and died in a camp (either Sobibor or Bergen-Belsen, depending on the source ). After the war he briefly continued his medical studies, then he began to appear in variety theaters and circuses (especially in the Netherlands, Belgium and France) and also to earn his living as a street artist (e.g. at the metro stations in Paris).

From 1952 he worked for the Mathematical Center in Amsterdam. In 1954 he gave a performance at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam. He gave lessons in schools and was invited to a lecture at the Sorbonne by a French professor from UNESCO . He then toured French and Swiss schools and was part of the Miracles of the Music Hall show. In 1957, Klein decided to settle down. He returned to Amsterdam and the Mathematical Center. During a two-week summer tour of schools in Switzerland in 1958, he made contact with CERN in Geneva. He thought that some of the work in the Mathematical Center was done for CERN. He got the offer to work for CERN and arranged a three-month break from the Mathematical Center. After four weeks, CERN asked if he didn't want to stay permanently. He stayed there for a total of 18 years. In the beginning he was very busy, as the computers were not very well developed and the physicists did not program themselves. From around 1965, however, there were more and more young physicists at CERN who programmed themselves and did not need his services to the same extent. In 1976 he retired from CERN. Computers had been used there for a long time, but Klein advised on the implementation of numerical calculations in computers. In his own words, however, that became increasingly boring for him in the 1970s.

After retiring from CERN, he turned back to public appearances and began digging roots out of large numbers. For example, he drew the 19th root of a number with 113 digits in 1 minute 43 seconds and in 1976 the 73rd root of a 500-digit number in 2 minutes 9 seconds. With these achievements, he was in the Guinness Book of Records several times and is considered to be one of the fastest mental calculators of all time.

Klein was found dead in his apartment in Amsterdam on August 1, 1986 and was probably stabbed to death by a robbery the day before. The case was never resolved.

Computing power

Wim Klein knew the multiplication table up to 110 × 100 by heart (through years of experience in arithmetic), the squares of the whole numbers up to 1000, the cube numbers of the numbers up to 100 and all prime numbers up to 10,000. He also knew the decadic logarithms of the whole numbers from 1 to 150 to five places, the first 32 powers of the number 2, the first 20 powers of the number 3 and some logarithms of the base e. In addition, he had memorized the dates of birth and death of around 150 composers. This gave him the tools to B. also carry out larger multiplications in the head, in that four-digit numbers could be carried out in blocks of two-digit multiplications.

  • October 8, 1974: 23rd root of a 200-digit number in 18 minutes, 7 seconds
  • March 5, 1975: 23rd root of a 200-digit number in 10 minutes, 32 seconds (in Lyon)
  • 1976: 19th root of a 133-digit number in 1 minute, 43 seconds
  • 1976 or later: 7th root of a 63-digit number in 8 minutes, 27 seconds
  • 1976 or later: 73. Root of a 500-digit number in 2 minutes, 9 seconds
  • September 1979: 13th root of a 100-digit number in 3 minutes, 25 seconds (in Providence, Rhode Island)
  • November 1979: 13th root of a 100-digit number in 3 minutes, 6 seconds (in Paris)
  • March 1980: 13th root of a 100-digit number in 2 minutes, 45 seconds (in Leiden)
  • May 6, 1980: 13th root of a 100-digit number in 2 minutes, 9 seconds (London, at the BBC )
  • November 10, 1980: 13th root of a 100-digit number in 2 minutes, 8 seconds (Berlin)
  • November 13, 1980: 13th root of a 100-digit number in 1 minute, 56 seconds
  • April 7, 1981: 13th root of a 100-digit number in 1 minute, 28.8 seconds (at the National Laboratory for High Energy Physics, Tsukuba, Japan)

literature

  • Stephen B. Smith: The great mental calculators. Columbia University Press, Chapter 34, Online
  • Samuel A. Schreiner jun. in Reader's Digest 1976: “The man with the computer brain. Win Klein solves the trickiest arithmetic problems in no time. This number artist even puts electronic computers in the shade ”.
  • Helmut Kuhn: Wim Klein - genius, clown or scientist: the arithmetic miracle that amazed the world. From the life of an unusual person. Ted Siera Publishing House, 1983.
  • Der Spiegel , issue 41/1983 online

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ Wortel is Dutch for root (because of its ability to pull roots out of long numbers; also the Dutch name for Daniel Düsentrieb)
personal data
SURNAME Klein, Willem
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Klein, Wim; Wortel, Willy; Pascal
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch mental calculator
DATE OF BIRTH 4th December 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Amsterdam
DATE OF DEATH August 1, 1986
Place of death Amsterdam