But imagine he had said, "it's the number of dimensions your Fourier transform needs for the fastest way to multiply two numbers" :)
BTW who things the other person was really just baiting Ramanujan to say something like this?
BTW who things the other person was really just baiting Ramanujan to say something like this?
> 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 unfavorable omen. “No,” Ramanujan replied, “it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.
The real question is, did he know of this fact already or did he come up with it on the spot after hearing what Hardy said?
n n³
-------
1 1
2 8
3 27
4 64
5 125
6 216
7 343
8 512
9 729
10 1000
11 1331
12 1728