A heated debate on a French radio station at the end of the year about who deserved the title of the most boring living Frenchman unkindly focused on a bearded Reims post-graduate, 27-year-old Alexis Lemaire, who does not drink or smoke, does not have a girlfriend, and has never been known to go on holiday.

This may however be what it takes to become a mathematical genius, one who last summer broke the world record human calculation in carefully controlled conditions at the London Science Museum. Lemaire correctly calculated the13th root of a huge random number of 200 digits. He took 70.2 seconds, beating his old record by nearly two seconds.

Lemaire trained for this feat by memorizing thousands of charts of numbers with an ease equivalent to ordinary mortals remembering their times table. Most people could not read the problem in 70 seconds, let alone work out the answer.

Writing a PhD thesis on artificial intelligence, Lemaire is on secondment from a French internet company developing language recognition systems. They offered their prodigy more time off to prepare himself for the Mental Calculation World Cup, to be held in Germany this year, but Lemaire declined.

This has led to some of his rivals, piqued by the snub, to question the value of his feat. German mathematician Rudiger Gamm asks rhetorically, “what else does Lemaire do apart from calculating the 13th root, brilliant though that is? In this calculation, the first number is always the same and the last is very easy to calculate. You just have to memorise a table of numbers and then anyone could do it.” Of course: simple, really…

From our January 2008 e-newsletter