Daniel Tammet vs Zerah Colburn
Two savants, compared on what is actually documented: field, era, country and record. No invented numbers.
The record, side by side
| Daniel Tammet | Zerah Colburn | |
| Field | Science | Mathematics |
| Sub-field | Biology | Mathematician |
| Born | 1979 | 1804 |
| Died | living / not documented | 1839 |
| Country of birth | ENG | - |
| Star sign | Aquarius | Virgo |
Who they are
Daniel Tammet
On 14 March 2004 — Pi Day — Daniel Tammet sat down in the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford and began to recite. For five hours and nine minutes he spoke the digits of pi, one after another, while observers checked him against the printed value. He stopped at 22,514 digits, a European record. To Tammet it had not felt like recall in the ordinary sense. He was not retrieving a list. He was, he said, describing a landscape he could see — pi as a rolling sequence of shapes, colours and…
Full biography of Daniel Tammet →
Zerah Colburn
In the winter of 1810, in a one-room farmhouse in Cabot, Vermont, a labourer named Abia Colburn overheard his six-year-old son chanting numbers by the fire. The boy — who had barely six weeks of schooling and whom the family had quietly assumed was slow — was reciting his multiplication tables. His father, half disbelieving, set him a problem: multiply 13 by 97. The child answered at once, and correctly. Within two years Zerah Colburn would be standing before audiences in London, extracting roots and naming the factors of large numbers faster than the mathematicians…
Full biography of Zerah Colburn →
What they share
- Both are documented on this site with a verified biography.
Where they part
- Different fields: Science for Daniel Tammet, Mathematics for Zerah Colburn.
- 175 years separate their births (1979 and 1804).
- Their lifetimes never overlapped.
Questions people ask
- Who came first, Daniel Tammet or Zerah Colburn?
- Zerah Colburn. Daniel Tammet was born in 1979, Zerah Colburn in 1804.
- What field is each of them in?
- Daniel Tammet is filed under Science (Biology). Zerah Colburn is filed under Mathematics (Mathematician).
- Were they contemporaries?
- No - their lifetimes do not overlap.