🇬🇧 Daniel Tammet

He was born Daniel Paul Corney on 31 January 1979, the eldest of nine children, and raised in Barking and Dagenham in East London. His childhood was marked by epileptic seizures and, later, a diagnosis that gave a name to the way his mind worked: Asperger syndrome, on the autism spectrum, combined with savant syndrome. He would change his surname to Tammet as an adult.

What makes Tammet unusual even among savants is synesthesia — in his case, a richly braided form of it. Numbers are not abstractions to him; each has a colour, a texture, a shape, sometimes an emotional character. Eleven is friendly. Five is loud. Pi, to him, is not a string of meaningless digits but something close to a piece of scenery. When he calculates, he describes watching two number-shapes meet and a third shape emerge in the gap between them, which he then reads off as the answer.

He is also a hyperpolyglot. In Born on a Blue Day he wrote that he knew ten languages, and his most famous demonstration of this was a wager: invited to Iceland, he was given one week to learn Icelandic — a notoriously difficult language — and then interviewed live on Icelandic television. He held the conversation. His native Icelandic interviewer called his command of the language 'not human.'

Tammet became, in the mid-2000s, the subject of intense scientific interest precisely because he could do something most savants cannot: explain himself. Researchers including Simon Baron-Cohen at the Cambridge Autism Research Centre studied him, and he featured in the documentary Brainman. Where many savants perform extraordinary feats without any access to how they do them, Tammet could narrate his inner experience in clear, articulate prose — a rare bridge between the savant mind and everyone else's.

He turned that ability into a writing career. Born on a Blue Day (2006) was an international bestseller and was named a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association. He followed it with Embracing the Wide Sky, a more scientific exploration of how the brain works, and later books including Thinking in Numbers. His central argument across all of them is that savant abilities are not magic and not entirely separate from ordinary cognition — that they sit on a continuum with the way every brain works.

His memoir also did something quieter and braver. In it he wrote openly about being gay, about his epilepsy, about the loneliness of a childhood spent not understanding other children and not being understood by them. For many readers on the autism spectrum, and many parents of autistic children, Born on a Blue Day was the first time the inside of such a mind had been described to them from within.

Tammet eventually settled in France and writes in both English and French. He has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and received an honorary doctorate from the Open University. His TED talk, 'Different Ways of Knowing,' frames his life's theme: that there is more than one valid way for a mind to apprehend the world, and that the synesthete's is not a defect but a difference.

The pi recitation remains his signature feat, and it later had an unexpected afterlife: Tammet revealed that the event inspired Kate Bush's song 'Pi' on her album Aerial. A musician had heard the story of a man reading numbers as scenery and turned it into a song — a fitting echo for someone who had always insisted that numbers were never just numbers.