> had been working on trying to prove Fermat's Last Theorem for years and as part of that work he had come across the number 1729 since it's related to elliptic

> had been working on trying to prove Fermat's Last Theorem for years and as part of that work he had come across the number 1729 since it's related to elliptic curves (the basis of which would eventually lead to a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem). I thought it wasn't that 1729 was related to elliptic curves and the proof, but that it was a "near-miss" candidate in a search for finding a counterexample in order to disprove the theorem. And 9³ + 10³ = 12³ + 1 = 1729 was the smallest of many of these near-miss candidates that Ramanujan had found. Was that not right?