Meet 14-Year-Old Tanmay Bakshi – Whizkid, Technologist, TedX Speaker
Tanmay Bakshi is not your average 14-year-old.
If someone asked you what you were doing at 14 years of age, you’d probably have vague recollections of going to school, playing your favourite computer games, and maybe, just maybe, doing the odd job at home to earn pocket money. That’s not the case with Tanmay Bakshi.
Bakshi is a cognitive developer, honorary IBM cloud adviser, neural network researcher, app-developer, and inspirational speaker. Of the over 60 applications he’s made so far, a couple have made to the Apple application store. In fact, his first application tTables, an app to help kids learn their multiplication tables, was built by him when he was just nine.
“It’s a funny story actually,” Tanmay said, speaking to BloombergQuint. Finding that he was struggling with his multiplication tables in the fourth grade, he realised that it would be more fun to come up with an algorithm to help him learn. Not only did he ace the test, but he also became one of the world’s youngest ever app developers.
A short while later, when exploring artificial intelligence, he hit a roadblock working with one of IBM’s softwares. He reached out to the tech community on Twitter for help. A pleasantly surprised group of IBM software developers responded to the prodigy with a fix to a problem they discovered on their software.
So, what does an average 14-year-old do for fun nowadays? In Canada, where Tanmay stays most of the time, maybe play ice hockey, or soccer, or even the odd video game. But evidently, Tanmay isn’t the average 14-year-old. When asked the same question, Tanmay grinned and answered, “I like to code for fun”.