He could remember the idiosyncrasies of numbers in an almost uncanny way. It was Littlewood who said that every positive integer was one of Ramanujan's personal friends. I remember once going to see him when he was ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. "No," he replied, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways."

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "He could remember the idiosyncrasies of numbers in an almost uncanny way. It was Littlewood who said that every positive integer was one of Ramanujan's personal friends. I remember once going to see him when he was ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. "No," he replied, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways."" in the context of "G. H. Hardy, in Ramanujan: Twelve Lectures on Subjects Suggested by His Life and Work (1940) Ch. 1 The Indian Mathematician Ramanujan, p. 12. The number 1729 is now known as the Hardy–Ramanujan number after this famous anecdote (1729 = 1³ + 12³ = 9³ + 10³)." to mean that wisdom is timeless.