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

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. Tammet's second book, Embracing the Wide Sky, was one of France's best-selling books of 2009. 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. Tammet's books have been published in over 20 languages. Tammet was elected in 2012 to serve as a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Tammet participated twice in the World Memory Championships in London under his birth name, placing 11th in 1999 and fourth in 2000. At age 25, Tammet was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome by Simon Baron-Cohen of the University of Cambridge Autism Research Centre. Tammet 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.

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". 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. In February 2007, Born on a Blue Day was serialised as BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week in the United Kingdom. Tammet argues that savant abilities are not "supernatural" but "an outgrowth" of "natural, instinctive ways of thinking about numbers and words". 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. 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.

After the World Memory Championships, Tammet participated in a group study, later published in the New Year 2003 edition of Nature Neuroscience. Tammet was found to have synaesthesia, according to the "Test of Genuineness-Revised", which tests the subjects' consistency in reporting descriptions of their synaesthesia. In a further study published in Neurocase in 2008, Baron-Cohen, Bor, and Billington investigated whether Tammet's synaesthesia and Asperger syndrome explained his savant memory abilities. While accepting that Tammet meets the standard definition of a prodigious savant, Foer suggests that his abilities may simply reflect intensive training using memory techniques, rather than any abnormal psychology or neurology.

Tammet describes the number 117 as "a handsome number. In his memoir, Tammet describes undergoing a synaesthetic and emotional response for numbers and words. In Born on a Blue Day, he writes that he knows 10 languages: English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Lithuanian, Esperanto, Spanish, Romanian, Icelandic, and Welsh. In Embracing the Wide Sky, Tammet wrote that he learned conversational Icelandic in a week, and appeared on an interview on Kastljós on RÚV speaking the language.

C'est une chose sérieuse que d'être parmi les hommes (2014), a collection of poems by Les Murray translated by Tammet into French

Mänti (, MAN-tee) is a constructed language that Tammet published in 2006.

American Library Association Booklist magazine "Editors' Choice Adult Books" (2007) for "Born on a Blue Day" The Sunday Times "Top Choice of Books" for Born on a Blue Day American Library Association Young Adult Library Services magazine Best Books for Young Adults" (2008)

American Library Association Booklist magazine "Editors' Choice Adult Books" (2017) for "Every Word Is a Bird We Teach to Sing"

Daniel Tammet at TED : Different ways of knowing (June 2011)

Quick Facts

• 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.
• Tammet was born Daniel Paul Corney on 31 January 1979.
• Tammet's books have been published in over 20 languages.
• 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.
• Tammet was elected in 2012 to serve as a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Source material: Wikipedia - "Daniel Tammet". Adapted and summarized for DiscoverScroll. Original contributors are credited through the linked Wikipedia article. Read original on Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes were made from the original.