Calculator

To calculate returns Election Night Columbia Broadcasting Co. engaged a human comptometer, Dr. Salo Finkelstein, 35, Polish Jew. As returns came in, he computed them more quickly and quietly than adding machine operators, whispered totals to the announcer.

Dr. Finkelstein has been demonstrating his numerical dexterity before psychologists at Harvard, Clark, Yale, New York and Columbia Universities, hopes to appear before fresh-water and Western institutions this winter. Last fortnight he dumbfounded bookkeepers, astounded office managers at the National Business Show in Manhattan. Boasted he: "I am better as 40 adding machines. I make it faster than any adding machines. Also without mistakes."

His boasting is well founded. Professor James David Weinland of New York University found that Calculator Finkelstein can add five single digit numbers in 1/1000th of a second, six single digits in 1/660th of a second. In one second he can scan a dozen two-digit numbers and call out the total. He can glance at a twelve-digit number, as 122,432,523,591, and repeat it 24 hours later. He attributes his speed and accuracy to "swift perception, long memory span, fluent associations, concentration, imagery." The number 9,836, for example, means to him 90 squared, plus 40 squared, plus 10 squared, plus six squared. He remembers 543 because 1543 is the date of Copernicus' death.

Some numbers he likes particularly well because they have many connotations. A favorite is 259, because 259,592 and 925 are all divisible by 37, because two raised to the fifth power (32) times nine squared (81) equals 2592; because there are 2,592,000 seconds in a [30-day] month; and because he counted 259 paragraphs in an edition of Spinoza's Ethics. Another favorite is 836, which squared gives 698,896, a palindrome (reads both ways). He likes 347 because it is a prime number, the year of Plato's death, and the telephone number of the rector of the University of Vilna [Dr. Aleksander Janusykiewicz]. He remembers that Edgar Allan Poe died in 1849 because 1849 is the square of 43.

Anyone, he claims, "can memorize a string of numbers. Except I do it quicker. I do it in a flash. Everything is in a flash with me. When I demonstrated for Einstein he said a second is for me what an hour is for someone else. He said the second stretches in my mind and is a long time in which I can work. There is nothing different about my mind, except for numbers. For numbers I am a genius."

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