Wallis the mathematician was a prodigy in this respect. He is reported to have been able to mentally extract the square root of a number to forty decimal places, and on one occasion mentally extracted the cube root of a number consisting of thirty figures. Dase is said to have mentally multiplied two numbers of one hundred figures each. A youth named Mangiamele was able to perform the most remarkable feats in mental arithmetic. The reports show that upon a celebrated test before members of the French Academy of Sciences he was able to extract the cube root of 3,796,416 in thirty seconds; and the tenth root of 282,475,289 in three minutes. He also immediately solved the following question put to him by Arago: “What number has the following proportion: That if five times the number be subtracted from the cube plus five times the square of the number, and nine times the square of the number be subtracted from that result, the remainder will be 0?” The answer, “5” was given immediately, without putting down a figure on paper or board. It is related that a cashier of a Chicago bank was able to mentally restore the
