Gert Mittring: The Man Who Nearly Failed Maths at School
He left German secondary school with an Abitur grade of 3.7 — a bare pass, the kind of result that closes doors. He would go on to extract the 13th root of a hundred-digit number in his head in 13.3 seconds, to pull twenty hidden five-digit primes out of a hundred-digit string in five and a half minutes, and, in Zurich in May 2016, to compute the 89,247th root of a number one million digits long. It took him six minutes and 1.4 seconds. The answer was 160,269,883,449.
The Boy Whose Passion Annoyed His Teachers
Mittring was born on 26 May 1966 in Stuttgart. The mathematical gift showed early and, by his own account, mostly caused trouble — an early passion for numbers that frustrated a succession of teachers. The school system's verdict was that near-failing Abitur mark, a fact he has never hidden and which functions in his story as both grievance and evidence.
It is evidence for a claim he has spent his career making in one form or another: that calculating and mathematics are not the same discipline, and that school marks measure neither reliably. A boy who could not satisfy his examiners grew into a man whose arithmetic was verified by psychologists at the University of Bonn and by lecturers at ETH Zürich.
Thirteen Seconds
The record that made his name was the 13th root of a 100-digit number, done mentally, without aids, in 13.3 seconds — documented and examined by Bonn psychologists. Root extraction of that kind is the marquee event of competitive mental calculation, and the reason is that it cannot be brute-forced. A hundred-digit number's 13th root is a number of a few digits; getting it requires knowing enough about logarithms, digit patterns and the behaviour of powers to narrow the field to one candidate almost instantly.
He has credited the late Dutch calculator Wim Klein as his inspiration — a lineage that places him in a specific European tradition of stage calculators stretching back over a century.
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Take the IQ test →Twenty Primes in a Hundred Digits
In 2012, at Europa-Park in Rust, Baden-Württemberg, Mittring attempted something with no precedent. Given a hundred-digit number, he was asked to identify the twenty five-digit prime numbers that composed it. He did it in five minutes and thirty seconds. As far as the organisers knew, no human being had ever managed the feat before. He set a further world record in prime-number extraction in 2013, and another in root extraction in 2015.
Zurich, 2016
The Zurich record on 5 May 2016 remains his most extreme. Competing at the European mental calculation championship, he was set the 89,247th root of a one-million-digit number — a problem devised and verified by ETH lecturer Andreas Steiger, who did not hedge his assessment: "This is the greatest achievement anyone has ever accomplished regarding mental root extraction." Mittring produced the twelve-digit answer in just over six minutes. He had attempted a comparable calculation the previous October at Europa-Park; that one had taken considerably longer.
He combined the record attempt with workshops for the junior competitors — which is, in miniature, the shape of his whole career.
The Day Job
Mittring is a Dr. Dr. — the German honorific for two earned doctorates. Sources describe the fields slightly differently: some list statistics and mathematics education, his own materials give pedagogy and psychology. Either way, the qualifications are the foundation of a working life that has almost nothing to do with stage records. He runs a psychological and giftedness-diagnostics practice in Bonn, assessing gifted children and the anxieties that surround mathematics; he consults for businesses on mathematical questions; he lectures, runs seminars, organises mental-arithmetic championships for schoolchildren and designs age-appropriate maths programmes. He sits on the Intelligence Research Committee of Intertel, a high-IQ society, and he has published books on the subject — *Rechnen mit dem Weltmeister* in 2012 and *Fit im Kopf mit Rechenweltmeister Dr. Dr. Mittring* in 2013.
German television has used him steadily — Stern TV, TV Total, 3 nach 9, Nachtcafé, Mittagsmagazin — which has made him the country's public face of mental arithmetic. He holds multiple Guinness World Records entries, and in competition he has been formidable: eight consecutive gold medals in mental calculation at the Mind Sports Olympiad from 2004 to 2011, and a record of competing there every year since 2004 while failing to take outright gold on only four occasions. He also took a silver in poker in 2005.
Why Gert Is Called a Genius
He is described in German media as a *Mathe-Genie*, and an estimated IQ of 175 is routinely attached to his name. Both claims need unpacking, because the truth is more specific and more interesting than either.
The cognitive quality genuinely on display is a combination of enormous, precisely indexed numerical memory and rapid algorithmic selection. To take the 89,247th root of a million-digit number, a calculator does not multiply anything; he works in logarithms, using memorised tables and a repertoire of narrowing heuristics developed over decades, holding intermediate values in working memory that would overflow most people's within seconds. That is a real and extraordinarily rare capacity, and Steiger — a professional mathematician who designed the problem — was unequivocal about its standing.
The counter-case is that this is a trained skill, not intellect in the general sense, and Mittring's own biography is the strongest argument for it. A man who nearly failed school mathematics is not evidence for raw mathematical brilliance; he is evidence that calculation is a separable, teachable discipline — which is precisely the premise on which he now runs children's championships and workshops. He has produced no theorem, no proof, no research mathematics. The "eleven-time world champion" figure that follows him derives largely from Mind Sports Olympiad titles and his own materials; at the flagship Mental Calculation World Cup in Gießen in 2006, he finished third overall, behind Robert Fountain and Jan van Koningsveld. The IQ of 175 is a reported estimate, not a certified score. The fairest description is that Mittring is among the very best human calculators who has ever lived, in a narrow and rigorously measurable discipline — and that he himself insists this is a skill others can learn, which is a more radical claim than genius and a considerably more useful one.
Legacy
Mittring's records will eventually fall; the discipline attracts specialists, and computation has a way of being outdone. What is likelier to last is the second half of his career — the Bonn practice, the diagnostics, the school championships, the books written for children who have been told they are bad at maths.
There is a symmetry in this that he has clearly noticed. A boy whose numerical obsession irritated his teachers into giving him a 3.7 has spent his adult life running the assessments that identify children like him, and building the competitions that give them somewhere to put it. The million-digit root is the headline. The workshops he ran in Zurich the same week are probably the point.
