1729 is known as the Hardy-Ramanujan number after a famous anecdote of the British mathematician G. H. Hardy regarding a hospital visit to the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. It is sometimes expressed using the term "positive cubes", as the admission of negative perfect cubes (the cube of a negative integer) gives the smallest solution as 91 (which is a factor of 1729):
91 = 6^3 + (−5)^3 = 4^3 + 3^3 Of course, equating "smallest" with "most negative", as opposed to "closest to zero" gives rise to solutions like −91, −189, −1729, and further negative numbers. This ambiguity is eliminated by the term "positive cubes". Numbers such as 1729 = 1^3 + 12^3 = 9^3 + 10^3 that are the smallest number that can be expressed as the sum of two cubes in n distinct ways have been dubbed taxicab numbers. 1729 is the second taxicab number (the first is 2 = 1^3 + 1^3). The number was also found in one of Ramanujan's notebooks dated years before the incident. 1729 is the third Carmichael number and the first absolute Euler pseudoprime. 1729 is a Zeisel number. It is a centered cube number, as well as a <>dodecagonal number, a 24-gonal and 84-gonal number. Investigating pairs of distinct integer-valued quadratic forms that represent every integer the same number of times, Schiemann found that such quadratic forms must be in four or more variables, and the least possible discriminant of a four-variable pair is 1729. Because in base 10 the number 1729 is divisible by the sum of its digits, it is a Harshad number. It also has this property in octal (1729 = 3301 to the base 8, 3 + 3 + 0 + 1 = 7) and hexadecimal (1729 = 6C1 to the base 16, 6 + C + 1 = 19 to the base 10), but not in binary. 1729 has another interesting property: the 1729th decimal place is the beginning of the first occurrence of all ten digits without repetition in the decimal representation of the transcendental number e, although, of course, this fact would not have been known to either mathematician, since the computer algorithms used to discover this were not implemented until much later. Masahiko Fujiwara showed that 1729 is one of four natural numbers (the others are 81 and 1458 and the trivial case 1) which, when its digits are added together, produces a sum which, when multiplied by its reversed self, yields the original number: 1 + 7 + 2 + 9 = 19 19 · 91 = 1729 Fujiwara claimed that he proved there are only four numbers that have the property. Even though it seems to be true, he never has shown his proof. It has occasionally been suggested that Hardy's story is apocryphal, on the grounds that he almost certainly would have been familiar with some of these features of the number.
source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1729_%28number%29