Exploring the Beauty of Fascinating Numbers

Shyam Sunder Gupta is a former senior officer of the Government of India and spearheaded multiple complex projects as Principal Chief Engineer of Indian Railways. He is an Indian Railway Service of Engineers (IRSE) officer of batch 1981. He has more than 35 years of experience in various managerial, administrative and technical positions, such as Principal Chief Engineer, Executive Director and Divisional Railway Manager on Indian Railways. An Indian recreational mathematician who is actively involved in popularising mathematics at the national and international levels. His major discoveries are Equal Product of Reversible Numbers (EPRNs), rare numbers, unique numbers, palindromic pseudoprimes, fifth-order prime polynomial, 17350-digit memorable prime, etc.

His interest in number recreations dates back to 1978, when his first paper, Miracles of Last Digit, was published. Since then, his contributions have been published in Science Reporter, Science Today, Math Education, At Right Angles, The American Mathematical Monthly, The Mathematical Gazette, Mathematical Spectrum, Scientia Magna and several international books like Unsolved Problems in Number Theory (by R. K. Guy), The Universal Book of Mathematics (by David J. Darling), The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers (by David Wells), Prime Curios!: The Dictionary of Prime Number Trivia (by Chris K. Caldwell and G. L. Honaker) and Those Fascinating Numbers (by Jean-Marie De Koninck). Author of the book, Creative Puzzles to Ignite Your Mind (Springer, 2023), he also co-authored Civil Engineering Through Objective Type Questions (CBS, 1985).