Book:G.H. Hardy/Ramanujan

Representative Quote

 * [ ] could remember the idiosyncrasies of numbers in an almost uncanny way. It was  who said that every positive integer was one of 's personal friends. I remember going to see him once when he was lying ill in Putney. I had ridden in a taxi-cab No. $1729$, and remarked that the number seemed to me a rather dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavpurable omen. 'No,' he reflected, 'it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.'