In this blog we’ve encountered a “boring number” in the
story of when the mathematician, Godfrey Hardy, commented to his protegee, the
great Srinivasa Ramanujan, that his taxi had an uninteresting number of 1729 (see post on Taxicab Numbers).
Ramanujan quickly replied that 1729 is indeed an interesting number as it is
the lowest number that can be expressed as the sum of two cubes of positive
numbers in two different ways 13+ 123 = 1729 and 103 + 93 = 1729.
The idea of boring numbers has
captured the interest of Philippe Guglielmetti who has searched
through the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, OEIS, for integers that
appear the least frequently.
Consider the number 20,067 – it is the lowest integer
that does not appear in any of the stored sequences (note the OEIS has over
360,000 sequences).
An article in Scientific
America by Manon Bischoff describes Guglielmetti’s effort in more detail.
Math
Vacation: What is the next number in the sequence...?
(jamesmacmath.blogspot.com)
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment