G.H. Hardy and the Taxicab Numbers: 🚕
Renowned British mathematician G.H. Hardy once took a taxi to visit his collaborator, Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, in the hospital.
Hardy noted that the taxi's number, 1729, seemed "rather dull," which prompted Ramanujan to respond that on the contrary, it was "very interesting" because it was the smallest number that could be expressed as the sum of two cubes in two different ways:
1729 = 1³ + 12³ = 9³ + 10³.
Numbers that can be expressed in this way have since been known as "taxicab numbers."