Daniel Tammet

Daniel Tammet (born Daniel Paul Corney; 31 January 1979) is an English writer and savant.

He participated twice in the World Memory Championships in London under his birth name, placing 11th in 1999 and 4th in 2000.

He changed his birth name by deed poll because "it didn't fit with the way he saw himself".

He took the Estonian surname Tammet, which is related to "oak trees".

At age twenty-five, he was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome by Simon Baron-Cohen of the University of Cambridge Autism Research Centre.

He is one of fewer than a hundred "prodigious savants" according to Darold Treffert, the world's leading researcher in the study of savant syndrome.

He met software engineer Neil Mitchell in 2000, and they started a relationship.

They lived in Kent.

He and Mitchell operated the online e-learning company Optimnem, where they created and published language courses.

Tammet now lives in Paris, with his husband Jérôme Tabet, a photographer whom he met while promoting his autobiography.

Tammet is a graduate of the Open University with a Bachelor of Arts degree with first-class honours in the humanities.

In 2002, Tammet launched the website, Optimnem.

After the World Memory Championships, Tammet participated in a group study, later published in the New Year 2003 edition of Nature Neuroscience.

The researchers investigated the reasons for the memory champions' superior performance.

He was the subject of a documentary film titled Extraordinary People: The Boy with the Incredible Brain, first broadcast on Channel 4 on 23 May 2005.

His memoir, Born on a Blue Day (2006), is about his early life with Asperger syndrome and savant syndrome, and was named a "Best Book for Young Adults" in 2008 by the American Library Association's Young Adult Library Services magazine.

In February 2007, Born on a Blue Day was serialised as BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week in the United Kingdom.

His second book, Embracing the Wide Sky, was one of France's best-selling books of 2009.

His second book, Embracing the Wide Sky, was published in 2009.

Allan Snyder, director of the University of Sydney Centre for the Mind, called the work 'an extraordinary and monumental achievement'.

Tammet argues that savant abilities are not "supernatural" but are "an outgrowth" of "natural, instinctive ways of thinking about numbers and words".

He suggests that the brains of savants can, to some extent, be retrained, and that normal brains could be taught to develop some savant abilities.

His third book, Thinking in Numbers, was published in 2012 by Hodder & Stoughton in the United Kingdom and in 2013 by Little, Brown and Company in the United States and Canada.

His books have been published in over 20 languages.

He was elected in 2012 to serve as a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Tammet was born Daniel Paul Corney, the eldest of nine children, and raised in Barking and Dagenham, East London.

As a young child, he had epileptic seizures, which remitted following medical treatment.

Thinking in Numbers, a collection of essays, was first published in 2012 and serialised as BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week in the United Kingdom.

His translation into French of a selection of poetry by Les Murray was published by L'Iconoclaste in France in 2014.

The site offered language courses (as of 2015, French and Spanish) and had been an approved member of the UK National Grid for Learning since 2006.

The website has been offline since January 2022, as of November 2023 redirecting to a "domain is for sale" page.

Born on a Blue Day received international media attention and critical praise.

Booklist magazine contributing reviewer Ray Olson stated that Tammet's autobiography was "as fascinating as Benjamin Franklin's and John Stuart Mill's" and that Tammet wrote "some of the clearest prose this side of Hemingway".

Kirkus Reviews stated that the book "transcends the disability memoir genre".

For his US book tour, Tammet appeared on several television and radio talk shows and specials, including 60 Minutes and the Late Show with David Letterman.

Tammet's first novel, Mishenka, was published in France and Quebec in 2016.

Every Word Is a Bird We Teach to Sing, a collection of essays on language, was published in the UK, US, and France in 2017.

In a review of the book for The Wall Street Journal, Brad Leithauser noted that "in terms of literary genres, something new and enthralling is going on inside his books" and that the author showed "a grasp of language and a sweep of vocabulary that any poet would envy".

Portraits, a bilingual first poetry collection, was published in French and English in 2018.

Written in French as a letter to a non-believing friend, the creative non-fiction work Fragments de paradis ("Fragments of Heaven") was published in France and Canada in 2020.