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I had first heard of Daniel Tammet during my college years, I have been fascinated by his story ever since and felt like I wanted to know more. On one of my random web-browsing sessions I searched for detailed information on Daniel Tammet on wikipedia. I then found out that he had written an autobiography called Born on a Blue Day. 

The title of the book should be taken literally. It's not a ''blue day'' because Daniel considers it to be a sad day, as the idiom might suggest, but because Daniel sees Wednesdays (he was born on a Wednesday) as of blue colour.

I rarely see a movie (or in this case a documentary) before reading the book which inspired it. This was one of those seldom occasions, which triggered the fact that when I had the book in my hands, I already knew what it was about, or at least I knew the gist of it.

Daniel is what science calls ''a savant'', deploying somebody with extraordinary intellectual capacities. In his case, the two fields in which he excels are mathematics and linguistics. Daniel can do enormous mathematical calculations (such as multiplying a number by itself 20 times) with exact precision and he was able to learn and recite in public  the number Pi up to 22,514 decimals with no mistake. Furthermore, he can learn a foreign language from scratch in less than a week.

He suffers from Asperger's which is a condition of the autistic spectrum and has had epileptic seizures as a small child. Fortunately for him and for the progress of science, his extraordinary intellectual capacities did not come with the major draw-back of complete lack of social skills, which is common in most cases of Autism.

One might believe that after seeing the documentary which I have mentioned at the beginning of this review, there would be no point in reading the book. This is totally false. The book provides an in-depth analysis of Daniel's life, from early childhood into adulthood. The acquisition of social skills was the greatest victory for the 'savant' who would not interact with other children at school in his early years, considering them as something to be tolerated, but not part of his world. Daniel confesses that growing up with other eight brothers might have helped a lot in the eventual development of his social skills. Even though he did not play with his brothers, observing their behaviour has helped his later understanding of the world.

Daniel presents a number of characteristics of Autism. His obsession for order, his passion for exact things, his initial incapacity to understand emotions are all part of the autistic world. The only skill that makes Daniel not completely fit into the frame is his capacity to interact socially, although this is what he finds most difficult to do.

From the point of view of mental/intellectual capacities, Daniel is fascinating and his biography only comes to confirm it. The mathematical calculations that he does are not the result of sustained effort, but of synestesic representations of the numbers as shapes and colours in his mind. He sees numbers as shapes and colours. Two numbers come together to form a third, distinct shape, which is the result of the calculation. He suspects his early epileptic seizures to have played a part in this representation of his inner world. He has always seen numbers as his best friends and whenever he feels anxious he starts counting. This, he says, has a soothing effect on him, because it creates beautiful, coloured landscapes in his mind.

Daniel was seen as a ''freak'' during school years and had no friends until late adolescence. His personal development actually began after he graduated school and chose to travel to Lithuania as a volunteer teacher. After discovering that he was able to live on his own and interact effectively in a professional environment, he came to terms with himself and all that he was as a person, including his homosexuality.

Falling in love with another man and being accepted for who he was has greatly helped improve his social skills and understand people's emotions. Daniel Tammet is a successful example of a very difficult struggle that he eventually won, a brilliant mind and a valuable resource to humanity, for being able to share his world with researchers, viewers or readers. And Born on a Blue Day was the perfect tool to do this!