taxicab number

English

Etymology

From an anecdote of the mathematician G. H. Hardy, who went to visit Srinivasa Ramanujan in a taxicab number 1729. Hardy suggested that the number seemed unremarkable, whereupon Ramanujan identified it as having this mathematical property.

Noun

taxicab number (plural taxicab numbers)

  1. (mathematics) The nth taxicab number, typically denoted Ta(n) or Taxicab(n), is the smallest number that can be expressed as a sum of two positive algebraic cubes in n distinct ways.
    Synonym: Ramanujan-Hardy number
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