'Smart' People

from wiki: An autistic savant (historically described as idiot savant) is a person with extraordinary mental abilities, often in numerical calculation, but sometimes in art or music. These skills are often, yet not exclusively, associated with mental retardation, and low I.Q.

Alexis Lemaire Alexis Lemaire (born 1980), is said by the Sunday Telegraph and The Times newspapers to be "the greatest human calculator in history" (8 April 2005). Lemaire holds the last official world record for extracting the 13th root of a 100-digit number (13.55 seconds) and the last official world record for extracting the 13th root of a 200-digit number (267.77 seconds). The latter is a calculation known as the most difficult in history.

The 13th root of a 100-digit number is something our graphing calculators can't even do.

Kim Peek According to Peek's father, Fran, Peek was able to memorize things from the age of 16-20 months. He read books, memorized them and then placed them upside down on the shelf to show that he had finished reading them, a practice he still maintains. He reads a page of text in about 10 seconds (about a book per hour) and, apparently, remembers everything he has read, memorizing vast amounts of information in subjects ranging from history and literature, geography and numbers, to sports, music and dates. He can recall some 12,000 books from memory. Peek can also do formidable calculations in his head, a skill that serves him well in his day job, where he prepares payroll worksheets. He has worked at a day workshop for adults with disabilities since 1969. Although never a musical prodigy, Peek's musical abilities as an adult are receiving more notice now that he has started to study the piano. He apparently remembers music he heard decades ago and can play it on the piano, to the extent permitted by his limited physical dexterity. He is able to give running spoken commentary on the music as he plays, comparing a piece of music, for example, to other music he has heard. In listening to recordings he can distinguish which instruments play which part and is adept at guessing the composers of new music by comparing the music to the many thousands of music samples in his memory.

This is the guy on which the movie Rain Man was based.

Daniel Tammet One afternoon when he was four, an accident changed the way Daniel thought forever. While playing with his brother in the living room he suffered a series of epileptic seizures which transformed his brain chemistry, giving him the gift of synaesthesia. Daniel began to respond emotionally to numbers, which he started to ‘see’ as complex, beautiful shapes and textures. Tammet holds the European record for remembering and recounting pi, recounting it to its 22,514th digit in just over 5 hours. Tammet claims he can learn a new language within a week. For the documentary film about him, Tammet was challenged to learn Icelandic. Within seven days he was conversing well enough in Icelandic to undergo a live television interview about his skills, and chat freely with the hosts. He is fortunate in that, while he possesses many of the capabilities associated with autism, he has no trouble relating to others; he is a charming and incredibly self-aware young man.

Daniel has the best of both worlds, lucky bastard.