<story><title>Hardy, Ramanujan and Taxi No. 1729</title><url>https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2022/01/30/hardy-ramanujan-and-taxi-no-1729/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pdevr</author><text>&amp;gt;&amp;gt;I remember once going to see him when he was lying ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi-cab No. 1729, and remarked that the number seemed to be rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavourable omen. “No,” he replied, “it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.”&lt;p&gt;The quote above is from G. H. Hardy  himself, from the book &amp;quot;Ramanujan: Twelve Lectures on Subjects Suggested by His Life and Work&amp;quot;. There was no need for him to embellish the story while it was published to &amp;quot;cheer up&amp;quot; Ramanujan, since the book was published in 1940 after Ramanujan&amp;#x27;s death.&lt;p&gt;Two great men can have different interests in the same field. It does not mean one of them had less ability. Hardy, since his early days, was fascinated by pure mathematics and rigor. Ramanujan was playing with numbers on pieces of paper since he was a child. That&amp;#x27;s why their contributions and intuitions, even though in the same broad field, are so different.</text></comment>
<story><title>Hardy, Ramanujan and Taxi No. 1729</title><url>https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2022/01/30/hardy-ramanujan-and-taxi-no-1729/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jbandela1</author><text>&amp;gt; Hardy either knew of Ramanujan’s work on this problem or noticed himself that 1729 had a special property. He wanted to cheer up his dear friend Ramanujan, who was lying deathly ill in the hospital. So he played the fool by walking in and saying that 1729 was “rather dull”.&lt;p&gt;If this is the case, it really increases my respect for Hardy. Anybody can brag, but to willingly seem to be the fool, in order to help someone else (and notice how even in his retelling of the story, he still plays the fool for others as foil to Ramanujan) takes a really big person.</text></comment>