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i agree, and i like your 'see who who are'

i say the same when people cite the taxi cab number(o) story and suggest some kind of intuition or magic

ramanujan simply had worked with cubes enough to recognise the number, still very impressive, but anyone could do it with the kind of interest ramanujan had for number theory

(o) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_number

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a rather interesting aspect of the taxicab number story is that ramanujan had been looking at "near misses" to the fermat equation, and this was the first values of one of the infinite families of near misses he had constructed. The story is often dramatized to make it sound like Ramanujan just knew about all the cubes and their sums and he pulled this out of thin air on the spot, but the truth is probably that he had worked enough with these equations to recognize the number when Hardy mentioned it.

check it out, super neat number thy stuff! https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.00735

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