Mathematical genius Shakuntala Devi served to bring the wonders of maths

Numbers are sexy. Not merely because they are lexicographically synonymous with figures but also because their practitioners' beautiful minds are the stuff of awe, admiration and fan blogs. A felicity with numbers not only gets as many headlines and as much TV time as the next celebrity, but movies feature in the equation too.

If there was any doubt in non-mathematical minds about the attractiveness quotient of this breed of calculating humans, there's even an American TV serial featuring a mathematician using numbers to help the police zero in on criminals. By that count, the life of Shakuntala Devi, India's first and certainly most famous "human computer", who passed away this week, should add up to more than an item number.

Lightning-fast mental maths that beat computers at their own core competence was second nature for Shakuntala Devi but a source of wonder for lay watchers.

Of course, she was a number-cruncher rather than a mathematical genius like Grigori Perelmen - who solved the Poincare Conjecture but has since then inexplicably shunned all publicity and prizes - but her extrovert evangelism of the lure of numbers has done more than the reclusive Russian's brilliance to hike the XXX factor of arithmetic. And that's what is needed to make more people fall for numbers.