THE STORY OF 1729

When Srinivasa Ramanujan, the great Indian mathematician was ill with tuberculosis in a London hospital, his colleague G.H. Hardy went to visit him. Hardy, trying to initiate conversation, said to Ramanujan, "I came in taxi-cab number 1729. That number seems dull to me which I hope isn't a bad omen."

"Nonsense," replied Ramanujan. "The number isn't dull at all. It's quite interesting. It's the smallest number that can be expressed as the sum of two cubes in two different ways." (Ramanujan recognized that 1729 = 1^3 + 12^3 as well as 9^3 + 10^3).

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Hardy-RamanujanNumber.html


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