which is exceptional about the number 1729?
Answers
1729 is the natural number following 1728 and preceding 1730. It is known as the Hardy-Ramanujan number, after an anecdote of the British mathematician G. H. Hardy when he visited Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan in hospital. He related their conversation:[1][2][3][4]
I remember once going to see him when he was ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me 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."
The two different ways are:
1729 = 13 + 123 = 93 + 103
The quotation is sometimes expressed using the term "positive cubes", since allowing negative perfect cubes (the cube of a negative integer) gives the smallest solution as 91 (which is a divisor of 1729):
91 = 63 + (−5)3 = 43 + 33
Numbers that are the smallest number that can be expressed as the sum of two cubes in n distinct ways[5] have been dubbed "taxicab numbers". The number was also found in one of Ramanujan's notebooks dated years before the incident, and was noted by Frénicle de Bessy in 1657.
The same expression defines 1729 as the first in the sequence of "Fermat near misses" (sequence A050794 in the OEIS) defined, in reference to Fermat's Last Theorem, as numbers of the form 1 + z3 which are also expressible as the sum of two other cubes.