Add Them Up
What's in a number? That is a tricky question to answer, as many believe there are infinite universes of information in each number. For example, if I see the number 12:34 on a clock, I know I'm in leadership or creation mode. In this case, I take 1+2+3+4 = 10, 1+0 = 1. The number 1 represents leadership and breaking new ground. However, this is just one example of how to read numbers. Today, I'd like to focus on the number 1729 and how it relates to an amazing mathematician that lived over a hundred years ago.
Srinivasa Ramanujan was born on 22 December 1887 into a Tamil Brahmin Iyengar family in Erode, present-day Tamil Nadu, India. Who is this man, and what did he contribute to the world? Srini was a mathematician, unlike any other genius we have ever known. His work has formed the basis for superstring theory (vibration) and multi-dimensional physics (not just 3 dimensions but 10, 11, or even 26). As a result, this is the most advanced math that high-end scientist use today, called the modular function. What? In other words, this math leads to time travel, anti-gravity, and free energy.
Srinivasa was a man far ahead of his time. He could see the math in ways his peers could not. When questioned how he could create such exquisite and detailed theories, he said it wasn't just his mind coming up with the answers; he had help.

Furthermore, it was communicated to him from an otherworldly being.
Chalk it Up
As a child and throughout his adolescence, he was obsessed with numbers and solving math problems. So much so that his other studies suffered. Nonetheless, Srini was focused on math and received information in his sleep.
He was no stranger to understanding that the universe held more than the third-dimensional human. Ramanujan grew up in the town of Kumbakonam in a house within view of the Sarangapani Temple. The temple has thousands of carvings of Hindu Gods that are complex mathematical equations that he had figured out and written in chalk on the temple floor.
Beyond this Dimension
Meanwhile, Srini stated that he constantly communicates with the Gods through his dreams, particularly with the Hindu Goddess, Namagiri Thayar. In his dreams, he would receive these visions in a fantastic and beautiful mathematical formula unscrolling before him. Consequently, Ramanujan understood that numbers connect us to the powers of the universe.
So, how is this man connected to modern-day advanced math, and what is the connection to the number 1729? It started with Srini seeking to engage with other high-level mathematicians. Hence, his math was too unknown and unique for the average professional mathematician to comprehend. In 1913 he began a postal correspondence with the English mathematician G. H. Hardy at the University of Cambridge, England. Realizing Ramanujan's extraordinary work, Hardy arranged for him to travel to Cambridge. Hardy commented that Ramanujan had produced groundbreaking new theorems, including some that "defeated me completely; I had never seen anything in the least like them before."
Throughout Srini's career, he independently compiled nearly 3,900 results (mostly identities and equations). Many were utterly unknown; his original and highly unconventional results, such as the Ramanujan prime, the Ramanujan theta function, partition formula, and mock theta functions, created new areas of work and inspired further research. Of his thousands of results, all but a dozen have been able to be proven by today's "smartest" mathematicians. As late as 2012, researchers continued to discover that mere comments in his writings about "simple properties" and "similar outputs" for specific findings were profound and subtle number theory results that remained unsuspected until nearly a century after his death. Godfrey Hardy noted that Ramanujan was a mathematician of the highest caliber, comparing him to mathematical geniuses such as Euler and Jacobi.

What's your Number?
The two men worked together at Cambridge; however, their styles could not be more different. Hardy was an atheist and an evangelist of proof and mathematical rigor, whereas Ramanujan was a deeply religious man who relied very strongly on his intuition and insights. Consequently, Hardy felt it necessary to teach Srini the ways of the west so that he could receive recognition for his genius in the English-speaking world. In less than three years, Ramanujan received the Fellow of the Royal Society, the second Indian admitted after Ardaseer Cursetjee in 1841. At age 31, Srini was one of the youngest Fellows in the Royal Society's history. He was elected "for his investigation in elliptic functions and the Theory of Numbers." Furthermore, On 13 October 1918, he was the first Indian to be elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
In late 1918, Ramanujan was extremely Ill. He was hospitalized and received a visit from Hardy. As Hardy recalls, I remember seeing 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." Srini died shortly after at the age of 32.

Taxi!
1729 is called the Hardy-Ramanujan number. It is the smallest taxicab number, i.e., the smallest number, or expressed as the sum of two cubes in two different ways:

A more obscure appearance of 1729 is as the average of the greatest member in each pair of (known) Brown numbers (5, 4), (11, 5), and (71, 7):

A few More
So, now you know what the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes is, what do you do with it? Well, the number is just the tip of the iceberg. In reality, Ramanujan had been busy developing a theory several decades ahead of its time and yields results that are interesting to mathematicians even today. However, he didn't live long enough to publish it.
Most importantly, in 2014, two mathematicians of Emory University, Ken Ono and Sarah Trebat-Leder have recently made a fascinating discovery nine decades later. Ono stated, "But here on a page, staring us in the face, were infinitely many near counter-examples to it, two of which happen to be related to 1729. Ono states, " Even today, nearly 400 years after Fermat's claim and 20 years after its resolution, only a handful of mathematicians know about the family Ramanujan had come developed. "I'm a Ramanujan scholar, and I wasn't aware of it." "Basically, nobody knew."

Tubular
Ramanujan was working on solving math problems that delved into the theory of elliptic curves and more complicated objects like K3 surfaces. That Ramanujan should have discovered and understood a complex K3 surface is remarkable. Srini's work on the K3 surface helped Ono and Trebat-Leder with a method to produce not just one but infinitely many elliptic curves requiring two or three solutions to generate all other solutions. It's not the first method found, but it requires no effort. "We tied the world record on the problem [of finding such elliptic curves], but we didn't have to do any heavy lifting," says Ono. "We did next to nothing except recognize what Ramanujan did."
A surprising twist also happened in the world of math and science. For decades there was a rift between quantum physics and physical theories that resulted in the two sides ignoring each other. However, One attempt at rescuing the situation was the development of string theory or a "theory of everything" uniting the disparate groups of modern physics. String theory is a construct that our world consists of more than the three spatial dimensions we can see. The extra dimensions, which we can't see, are rolled up tightly in tiny little spaces (Calabi-Yau manifolds) too small for us to perceive. The simplest classes of Calabi-Yau manifolds come from the K3 surfaces, which Ramanujan was the first to discover.

Read all About It!
It is unclear how many other secrets we will find going back to Srinivasa Ramanujan's notes and formulas, but one thing is for sure, he wanted to help the human race advance. Ono states that he has known about 1729 for thirty years. "It's a lovely, romantic number. Ramanujan was a genius, and we are still learning about the extent to which his creativity led him to his formulas."
So, the next time you look at a group of numbers, know this, there is more to it than meets the eye. If you look without your seeing eyes, you may find access to infinite universes.
