DANIEL TAMMET

Savant syndrome
Savant syndrome

■ Savant syndrome is a rare condition in which someone with

significant mental disabilities demonstrates certain abilities far
in excess of average The skills that savants excel at are
generally related to memory. This may include rapid
calculation, artistic ability, map making, or musical ability.
Daniel Tammet

■ Born: 31 January 1979 in London.

■ with high-functioning autistic savant syndrome, with exceptional
mathematical and linguistic abilities.
■ His childhood was affected by Asperger's syndrome, synesthesia,
epileptic seizures. Tammet imagines numbers as having a unique shape,
color, composition, feeling. He does not calculate in the usual way, the
answer he needs just appears in his mind. Tammet is able to perform
mathematical operations by heart with large numbers, reproduce 22,514
decimal places of the number pi.
Personal life

■ He participated twice in the World Memory Championships in London

under his birth name, placing 11th in 1999 and 4th in 2000.
■ He changed his birth name by deed poll because "it didn't fit with the way
he saw himself." He took the Estonian surname Tammet, which is related
to "oak trees".
■ Tammet is a graduate of the Open University with a Bachelor of Arts
degree with first-class honours in the humanities.
Career

■ In 2002, Tammet launched the website, Optimnem. The site offers

language courses (currently French and Spanish) and has been an
approved member of the UK National Grid for Learning since 2006.
■ Tammet's first novel, Mishenka, was published in France and Quebec in
2016.
Curiosities

■ Tammet set the European record for reciting pi from memory on 14

March 2004 – recounting to 22,514 digits in five hours and nine minutes.
■ He is a polyglot. In Born on a Blue Day, he writes that he knows eleven
languages: English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Lithuanian,
Esperanto, Spanish, Romanian, Icelandic, and Welsh.
■ In Embracing the Wide Sky, he wrote that he learned conversational
Icelandic in a week, and appeared on an interview on Kastljós on RÚV
speaking the language.
■ In his mind, Tammet says, each positive integer up to 10,000 has its own
unique shape, colour, texture and feel. He has described his visual image
of 289 as particularly ugly, 333 as particularly attractive, and pi, though
not an integer, as beautiful.