Hans Eberstark

Hans Eberstark is an Austrian linguist, translator, and mental calculator.

Eberstark often lectured on language and translation in Europe, and was famous for asking someone whose first language was a small local dialect of German (particularly Swiss German, of which there are countless dialects) to speak with him (during the lecture), after a couple minutes of which Eberstark would suddenly start speaking fluently in that dialect.

Of Viennese Jewish origin, he spent some of his early years in Shanghai (China) with many other displaced people from all over Europe. It was there that he was exposed to many different languages.

A member of Mensa, Eberstark was a resident of Geneva, Switzerland, where he worked as a translator. In the late 1960s he was married with two children. He once told group of friends that he "knew" the date he would die.

He also is known for having once recited 11,944 successive digits of the mathematical quantity of pi from memory. During an earlier attempt he had intended on reciting roughly half that many but had made a mistake. He was angry with himself for the mistake so he memorized even more.

There was a profile on him in the October 1993 issue of "Atlantic Monthly".