Youth sets world record by subtracting 100-digit numbers under a minute

During the lockdown, he decided to set a world record – he has subtracted 100-digit numbers in 54.89 seconds. This fete was recognised by Spain-based Official World Record Organization (OWR). Rahul, who is currently pursuing a post-graduate diploma in Risk Management, says, “I love to watch world record events and am fascinated by different world records created by people. I wanted to achieve one for myself. But, the thought of it was daunting at first. Since I was decent at solving arithmetic operations, I chose subtraction. When I started practicing, I did not have a fixed number in my head. I went along with the flow and started practicing with 30 digits. As the days went by, I increased it to 60, 70, 80 digits. But I was not convinced with 80 digits. So, I pushed to 100 digits. Once, I zeroed in on the number of digits, the first problem was out of the way. The next two issues were speed and accuracy. I found it difficult to gauge the amount of time I could complete this in, as it used to take 3+ minutes to complete the 100 digits subtraction in the early stages of practice. This demoralised me and went through his share of ups and downs. But, I was determined to conquer this feat and felt that cracking it in less than 70/60 seconds would suffice and can be considered an achievement. So, with a lot of determination I started practicing and one fine day I got a breakthrough. I started seeing improvements with my speed. Then I started focussing on accuracy and saw an improvement in that as well,” begins Rahul.

The event was held online in the presence of OWR judges who came on Zoom to witness it. The judges send the digits of the first and second rows on zoom chat and the numbers were called out by Rahul’s brother Sanjay and the digits were written on the chart papers by Rahul’s mother Gowri.

“I was not present in the room when the question was called out. For extra authenticity, a timer was monitored from both ends simultaneously when I was performing and it matched in the end. The answers were sent out by the judges on zoom chat again. The final answer was corrected and then verified by the officials,” he says.