13-year-old prodigy Aaryan Shukla from Maharashtra, India, left a large audience speechless when he achieved a Guinness World Records title with his incredible maths skills.
On the set of our Italian TV series Lo Show Dei Record, this ‘human calculator’ set the record for the fastest time to mentally add 50 five-digit numbers – a mere 25.19 seconds.
That’s about one addition every 0.5 seconds!
As Aaryan stood on stage looking at a large screen, all 50 numbers flashed before his eyes one after the other, so quickly that the average audience member couldn't even read and process each one before it disappeared and got replaced by the next number.
After the last one was shown, Aaryan took a few seconds to finish his mental calculation before coming up with the correct answer in front of a stunned crowd.
We caught up with him backstage after the successful attempt, and got to know more about him.
Aaryan explained how he discovered his talent:
“I started doing mental maths at the age of six years and then slowly, gradually I started […] to solve tougher problems. Then I started to go into competitions and slowly I became world champion.
“My favourite thing about mental maths is that I can represent my country at various stages. And secondly, it means that I could become a world champion at the age of 12 years!”
Indeed, Aaryan won the prestigious Mental Calculation World Cup in 2022 in Paderborn, Germany, and is even one of the founding board members of the Global Mental Calculators Association (GMCA).
GMCA’s mission is to foster the collaboration between mental calculators, expand and strengthen mental mathematics worldwide, as well as to host a first-of-its-kind mental calculation league.
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Aaryan was thrilled to return home and share the news with his friends:
“They will be excited, they appreciate me a lot and, yeah, they will be happy.”
One might suppose that calculation is Aaryan’s only passion but, when it comes to school, maths is just one of his many favourite subjects: “I equally like […] history, physics, geography and science.”
And, even more surprisingly, the boy wonder finds the time to pursue other hobbies:
“The first one is to read books, […] mainly adventure or mystery.
“And second, I like to play cricket and watch it a lot. I love to collect information about cricket! Oh, and I also love watching football. I don’t play too much but still, I like to see the stats.”
Even though he hasn’t decided what he wants to be when he grows up, Aaryan knows it will be something related to maths.
This teen’s extraordinary journey has just begun, but he’s already proven to young people everywhere that anything is possible when you put your mind to it.
Congratulations, Aaryan, you are Officially Amazing!
Missed Aaryan's appearance on Lo Show dei Record? Viewers in Italy can watch it now on Mediaset Infinity. Lo Show dei Record airs Sundays on Canale 5.
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