Lemme spell it out... Seventeen Twenty-Nine

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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For those of you who saw me show up in the “Birthday Post” thread, this is the post I had special plans for.

This is Olentzero’s Post #1729, and it’s devoted to the number 1729.

Why, you ask? Grab a seat, this’ll take a few minutes.

If any of you have read the excellent book Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstader, you may remember that the number 1729 is the lowest number that is the sum of two different sets of cubed positive integers:

12[sup]3[/sup] + 1[sup]3[/sup] = 1729
10[sup]3[/sup] + 9[sup]3[/sup] = 1729

which in itself is kinda cool.

Well, years ago when I was a much younger man, this number started popping up in some strange places. I’d picked up a book on the history of LSD out of my local head shop and found that when the US Army tested LSD as a potential chemical weapon, they gave it the tag EA-1729.

A buddy/co-worker at the McDonald’s where I was employed at the time, and who was just as nerdy as I was, had been previously enlightened regarding the mathematical properties absolutely freaked when he found this out. We both decided that 1729 had special significance and was a number that deserved special respect. And thus it became an in-joke between us. We would take any sequence of numbers we could find and see if we could get 1729 out of it - he admitted my superiority when I found I could get it out of my birthday (11/2/69).

Over the years this number has popped up in some funky places:

-It’s the birth year of Catherine the Great.

-The Paris Commune occurred 29 years before the turn of the 20th century (1871) and the Russian Revolution occurred 17 years after.

-In Karel Capek’s War of the Newts (a science fiction novel about the discovery of an intelligent species of salamander in the ocean) one of the Newts held as a circus curiosity asks, “What is seventeen times twenty-nine?”

-The wizards’ currency in Harry Potter’s world is based on 17 and 29.

There used to be a lot more I found about this number but it’s late, I’m pretty drunk, and by now you all have probably had enough. So I’ll leave you with this one question:

What does 8:43 have to do with all this?

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[standard post party reply] Good for you. :smiley: [/standard post party reply]

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I believe 1729 was J. Pierpoint Morgan’s membership # in the illuminati and Joseph Stalin’s was 1792.

Ooo-wheee-ooo!

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1729? That’s so yesterday. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Um, I didn’t follow that math thingy, but if it was Catherine the Great’s birth year, it’s good enough for me. Even if she spells her name wrong.

Happy 1729!

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It’s seventeen to nine (17 2 9).

And with a flourish of his cape, he is away!

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Does this have anything to do with the 17/23 correlation, possibly?

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his obvious riddle prowess is yet another reason for me to boink mr. lux.

[sub]It’s only stalking if you get caught[/sub] :stuck_out_tongue:

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And there I was, watching Tom Green wrestle with his bout with ball cancer. Never in my life have I been, ah, privileged to read about the mathematical and mystical properties of this fascinating number. It could take the place of three in “Three Is a Magic Number” in the Schoolhouse Rock catalog.

Olentzero, honey, you know I love you and all, but you need to get some sleep.

Robin

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Hey Olentzero, don’t forget about 5:29 pm, a.k.a. 1729.

17º N latitude by
29º E longitude puts you about 400m miles WNW of Khartoum, Sudan.

Just a litlle 1729 trivia for your 1729th. Congratulations.

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17N 29W: Atlantic Ocean
17S 29E: 101 km WSW of Kariba, Zimbabwe
17S 29W: Atlantic Ocean

17W 29N: 97 km northwest of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain
17W 29S: Atlantic Ocean
17E 29N: 105 km east of Hun, Libya
17E 29S: 31 km NNE of Port Nolloth, South Africa

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My mother was 29 when my youngest sister was born. Her older sister is now 17. Coincidence?

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Freak!

:stuck_out_tongue:
and let me add that on September 23rd of this year… Southern Methodist lost to Tulane 17 to 29.

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A post party for Ramanujan’s Number! Olent, that is so cool.

The story is that when the mathematician Ramanujan was in the hospital (dying, as it turned out), his friend and colleague G.H. Hardy came to visit. “Did you see any interesting numbers on the way over?” asked Ramanujan. “No, I didn’t,” replied Hardy. “The number of the cab was 1729, but that’s not particularly interesting.” Ramanujan replied, “Oh, no, that’s a very interesting number - it’s the smallest number that’s the sum of two cubes in two different ways!”

To Ramanujan, it was as if the integers were his personal friends. He knew stuff like that off the top of his head.

(BTW, the stuff I have in quotes isn’t actually quotes. I’m doing this one from memory, but that’s the gist of the conversation as related by Hardy.)

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I been AWOL for a couple days so I just wanted to reply.

Lux Fiat, bravissimo! Just remember it may be 1729 that gets you laid next year (re: Sapphire Bullet’s comment).

RTF Thank you! :slight_smile: What would the board be if we all had post parties just ending in three zeroes?

matt_mcl - thanks for the geographic reference points. What would be cool is if we could find out where those points would be if we used other, older standards for the prime meridian.

ChiefWahoo, of course. But there’s little to commend 5:29 PM in and of itself, except as a holiday moment on July 29th.

Thanks to all of you for replying, it’s nice to see that thinly diguised post parties aren’t completely ignored around here. :smiley:

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little known fact. Cecil has been fighting ignorance since 1972, NOT 1973 as most would have you believe…

1972
1729

notice anything??

No wonder you were drawn to this board…

(actually, this is pure crap AFAIK, but it looks good in the general gist of the thread…)

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I’m not this brilliant, but 1729 is NOT a dull number according to:

http://www.mathpages.com/

The Dullness of 1729
Beginning at the 1729th decimal digit of the transcental number e,
the next ten successive digits of e are 0719425863. This is the
first appearance of all ten digits in a row without repititions.
So if anyone ever tells you that 1729 is a dull number, you should
affect a moment of contemplation and then say “Not at all, it is
the first occurrance of all ten digits consecutively in the decimal
representation of e”. Now THAT’s impressive.

But seriously, it’s always seemed implausible to me that Hardy
thought 1729 was a dull number. In addition to being the smallest
number that is a sum of two cubes in two distinct ways, it’s also a
Carmichael Number, i.e., a pseudoprime relative to EVERY base.

Incidentally, the first three Carmichael Numbers are 561, 1105, and
1729. Notice that 1105 is expressible as a sum of two SQUARES in
more ways than any smaller number, and of course 561 is expressible
as a sum of two first-powers in more ways than any smaller number.

Happy 1729th!

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I was born 17 days late to my mother when she was 29. :slight_smile:

Congrats, Olent!

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