Willis Dysart

Who is Willis Dysart?

Willis Nelson Dysart is an American mental calculator. Born in the U.S. state of Georgia in 1924, his talent for arithmetic emerged at the age of three after his mother taught him to count. He quit school in the third grade and pursued a career as a lightning calculator.

In 1938 Robert Ripley featured Dysart in his ‘Believe It Or Not’ newspaper column and introduced what would become Dysart’s stage name - ‘Willie the Wizard’.

In 1940 Dysart was recruited by a local radio station to tally votes in the US presidential election. Dysart would very quickly give "the exact standing of any candidate on the board, including his current total, the percentage of votes counted at that point and the probable outcome of the contest on the basis of existing information". Not content with that, Dysart would provide a little entertainment by, for instance, asking for the birth dates of the candidates and immediately giving the years, months, hours, minutes and seconds they had lived to that moment

Dysart has given many live demonstrations of his skill at a range of venues. He has also appeared on numerous television shows, including I’ve Got a Secret, You Asked For It, The Art Linkletter Show and The Joe Pyne Show, which made him famous in the United States. He has also been the subject of psychological studies.