Boring Numbers

 

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)