![]() A student of psychology, he has such a stupendous memory for numbers that he himself has become a research tool for psychologists. But the loquacious 32-year-old from Mangalore, India, is also one of the world's half-dozen or so living hypermnesiacs - people with gargantuan memory powers. He lives in a hopelessly cluttered bachelor apartment and spends his evenings at the campus hangout, a bar and pool parlor called Fast Eddie's. Ambling around the Kansas State University campus in a T-shirt, old painter pants, and sandals, slipping off to the grad students' office on the fifth floor of Bluemont Hall for a smoke, Mahadevan looks every bit the classic graduate student. "I will never forget." Somehow, that commonplace promise seemed to carry formidable possibilities when it was uttered by Rajan Srinivasen Mahadevan. Second, the series 623, which is reminding me of Avogadro's number, you know, the atomic weight constant. "It's an easy number to remember," he said cheerfully. ![]() When he opened his eyes and came back into the world, Mahadevan flashed me his big, friendly grin and recited my telephone number, first backward, then forward. Mahadevan listened intently, then closed his eyes for a few seconds and fell into deepest thought, rocking to and fro on his chair. I put the card away and told him my number. Just tell me." Just tell him! Of course! Here I was talking to a living natural phenomenon, a research psychologist's dream come true, one of the most prodigious numerical memorists in the history of recorded science, and I had suggested that he couldn't even remember a telephone number. "To use one of your cards for me, there is no need. "No - I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" he said with alarm. A look of consternation creased Mahadevan's face. Mindlessly, reflexively, I reached in my pocket for a business card. 5, 1987, after he had told me the row and seat number he was assigned on Air India's Flight 107 from Madras to Bombay nine years ago, after he had spun off the reservation telephone numbers for Braniff, United, TWA, Delta, Southwest, American and Continental airlines, after he had laughed ruefully about the trouble he always has remembering the 31,812th digit of pi - after all that, he told me he'd like to chat again and asked for my telephone number. After I had spent a good deal of time with Rajan Mahadevan - after he had recited, from memory, the first 30 digits of Euler's constant, after he had written out, in his rapid-fire left-handed chicken scratch, a block of 50 random digits he had last seen at 9:15 a.m.
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