math

What's special about number 1729? I give this as a challenge. I couldn't solve it for decades, but Srinivasa Ramanujan, the greatest math genius ever, solved it instantly. Please just don't google or something, try to solve it by yourselves. Unless you already know the answer, of course. My IQ is 98, so you guys will solve it quickly.

Hint: it has something to do with cubes.

I knew that Gauss thing. I've been told this a couple of times. I didn't know the 1729 thing. It's like impossible to come up with yourself without any hints as to what is so special about this number. You'd rather come up with your own answer than reinvent the *true* one. You can think about any number, like, 243592 and ask people what's so special about it and maybe somebody will find something special about it. There's a bunch of numbers that are *special*.

I personally think 42 is a more interesting number.

May I ask why?

Hint: 1729 = 1000 + 729

Hint: Third power.

The answer to the ultimate question of life the universe and everything.

42 divided by 2 is 21. Add 10 and you get 31. Subtract 1 and you get 30. Now add 3 and 0 and you still get 3. Finally, add 15. You get 18. You know who was 18 once?

Hitler.

Yeah math is cool, I use it.
When I starred in that documentary they showed my calculations for how I applied calculus to beer pong.

I'd show you a clip but google drive has been "loading" for about 5 minutes now. POS.
edit: found a partial one that I uploaded to vimeo.

In my film I'm playing a character named "Nathan Gauss"

You can also degauss things. Degaussing is the process of decreasing or eliminating a remnant magnetic field.

Nein times nein is eighty one. Or zero.

I love math philosophically, big-picture-wise. I love how it is the language of the universe and can explain or interpret things. But I struggle with it hands-on, unfortunately. My brain is far too scattered.

So, we have 1729 = 1000 + 729 = 10^3 + 9^3. But 10, 9 isn't the only pair of integers third powers of which added give 1729. Which is the other pair?

Me too. My favorite area is mathematical logic, which is on the edge of philosophy and math.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_logic

You might like this bloke



David Hilbert, one of the greatest mathematicians of all time and my personal favorite. He was a philosopher in his heart and one of the most interesting people I know.

12^3+1^3

If you think statistics is miserable try reading some econometric theory. While some of the stuff you mention here is PHD level math. I had some PHD in math but I dropped out, I found it too arid for me. Not as bad as a Kiarostami film though.

This is me too. There is is fantastic programme on our BBC Radio 4 called In Our Time Which takes a subject and runs with it for 45 minutes, the presenter Melvyn Bragg and a couple of experts in a studio talking. Could be anything, recent ones have been Frida Kahlo, Alexander The Great and Perpetual Motion, but there's been loads of maths ones - Pythagorus, Infinity, Zero, Fermat's Last Theorum. I love this programme, but the maths ones I absorb at the time but it's like a fleeting understanding. I hope something gets into my head but I struggle too!

You got it, Mr Minio! This particular number, however, is the least number with the property that it's expressable as a sum of two cubes in two different ways. Can someone prove that?

Thanks.

Fermat's Last Theorem was first conjectured in early 17th century by a French lawyer Pierre De Fermat, whose hobby was math. We'll go far back now. Pythagorus' theorem says that a triangle is right if and only if a^2 + b^2 = c^2, a, b, c being its sides. Are there any integers that satisfy the equation? Yes, there are infinetely many and they're called Pythagorean triplets. The first is 3, 4, 5. Fermat raised a question whether there are integers a, b, c satisfying the equation a^n + b^n = c^n, n being a given integer greater than 2. He himself solved it for n = 4, there aren't any, except trivial ones, like 0, 0, 0, Euler solved it for n = 3 (more or less, Gauss corrected an error), there aren't any, but the first step towards a general solution was givan by Sophie Germain. Ernst Eduard Kummer took it further and showed there are no solutions if n is the so-called regular prime:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_prime

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_prime

A prime number is a positive integer that's divisible only by 1 and itself. It took another 150 years before it was shown that FLT reduces to the so-called Taniyama-Shimura-Weil conjecture, which was finaly proven by Andrew Wiles in 1995, after he locked himself in a room for 7 years. in '94 he thought he had it, but after he called Richard Taylor, the latter found an error in half an hour. The two finaly acomplished it in '95.