Ramanujan, alone, malnourished, depressed, and suffering from suspected tuberculosis, attempts suicide by throwing himself under the London Underground. Only the intervention of a guard stops the vehicle a few feet from the prostrate body of the mathematician. During a visit from his mentor, Hardy, the latter cites the number of the taxi that brought him there, 1729, as an example of an insignificant number. At his bedside, Ramanujan, unstoppable: “It is, in fact, a very interesting number. It is the smallest number that can be expressed in two different ways as the sum of two cubes. In fact, 1729 = 1^3 + 12^3 = 10^3 + 9^3.
