Here is Chuang's post on an anecdote about Ramanujan:
Ramanujan was sick and was taken care in the hospital. Hardy once came over and talked to Ramanujan about the taxi that he just went on has a truly boring car number: 1729.
Ramanujan replied immediately: "No. This is a very interesting number."
"It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways."
There is even an article on wikipedia telling the story. Before you click on the web page, why not try to find out the two pairs of integers?
1729
Wiki on Ramanujan
I (Chern Chuang) remember that I first time read about this story was reading Prof. 曹亮吉's book: <阿草的葫蘆> in junior high. At that time I was busy hand-making various paper models of uniform polyhedra.
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