3 ms·

Hardy just saw it on a taxi cab and expressed sadness; Ramanujam pointed out the mathematical beauty of the number. The real question is, did he know of this f

• mkl 7y ago
  I suspect he knew it already. It kind of stands out as an almost-repeated digit pattern if you look at a table of cubes (in base 10), as the cube sums concerned are 10³+9³ = 1000+729 and 12³+1³ = 1728+1. Showing that it's the smallest such number is not difficult, but would take a bit of thought to come up with on the spot. You can do it by checking a few combinations of terms from your table: 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