Buy the World Almanac for Kids 2008 to get secret codes that unlock more free content wherever these boxes appear on the site.

Enter Code:

Srinivasa Ramanujan, a brilliant, largely self-taught 20th century Indian mathematician, made major contributions in number theory. The British mathematician G. H. Hardy tells of visiting him and mentioning that the number of the taxi he had just taken was 1729, which struck Hardy as a “dull number.” Ramanujan immediately replied that, on the contrary, 1729 was a very interesting number, being the smallest number that could be written in two different ways as the sum of two cubes: 13 + 123 or 93 + 103.