The full anecdote as told by Hardy is > 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

The full anecdote as told by Hardy is > 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.