Daniel Tammet

“No relationship is without its difficulties and this is certainly true when one or both of the persons involved has an autistic spectrum disorder. Even so, I believe what is truly essential...”

“I recited Pi to 22,514 decimal points in five hours and nine minutes. I was able to do this because of weeks of study, aided by the unusual synaesthesic way my mind perceives numbers as comp...”

“I love music. I have a fondness for Chopin, and I very much like his 'Raindrop Prelude.'”

“I certainly have routines in my day-to-day life that are important to me and still give me feelings of security and control, but the capacity to break out of them every so often as I travel...”

“One of the lines from my books is about having respect for different minds, and if I had to have an epitaph at this point in my life, that would be it.”

“Fischer, the great American chess champion, famously said, 'Chess is life.' I would say, 'Pi is life.'”

“Squaring numbers is a symmetrical process that I like very much. And when I divide one number by another, say, 13 divided by 97, I see a spiral rotating downwards in larger and larger loops...”

“I know from my own experience that there is much more to 'intelligence' than an IQ number. In fact, I hesitate to believe that any system could really reflect the complexity and uniqueness o...”

“I found maths very easy, but I still enjoyed discovering things. You have to have the necessary information. For example, what's the difference between the mean and the median? Probability f...”

“How any person decides to emphasize strengths and mitigate weaknesses is something people have to figure out for themselves. I'm wary of the self-help literature that suggests there are cert...”

“I feel traveling certainly does broaden the mind. In my case certainly I feel more confident. It gives you a new perspective on the world.”

“There is this mythology that says that when people are born, their brains are essentially fixed very early on and they're not able to change their connections. I was aware that was a myth an...”

“I can well imagine that certain writers, even writers that we'd consider today very great writers, may not necessarily have tested highly on IQ just because of their numerical skills, or may...”

“Logic obviously is important. You need to be able to figure things out, to go to the end of a particular problem. But intuition is very important because it references things that logic alon...”

“When I achieved the European record for reciting pi in 2004, this captured the imagination of Professor Simon Baron-Cohen in Cambridge, and he finally diagnosed me with Asperger's that year.”

“I think if I ever stopped pushing myself, I would revert quickly to quite repetitive, restrictive behaviour. But in pushing myself and concentrating on what I can do, I think I can contribut...”

“I consider social skills a bit like learning a language. I've been practising it for so long over so many years I've almost lost my accent.”

“Someone who copies a Van Gogh does not therefore become Van Gogh, and the same would go for Mozart or anyone else who contributed something that was original. Certainly in the way that I des...”

“I have never played the lottery in my life and never will. Voltaire described lotteries as a tax on stupidity. More specifically, I think, on innumeracy.”