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April 14, 2016 08:00 pm

Golden State and the Mathematical Magic of Seventy-Three

Charles Bethea has written a fascinating piece on the number '73' for The New Yorker. Below are some tidbits from the story but I urge you to hit the New Yorker link and read the story in entirety there. Bethea writes: "I am aware of the Warriors's push for seventy-three wins," Ken Ono, a professor of mathematics at Emory University and the author of "The Web of Modularity: Arithmetic of the Coefficients of Modular Forms and q-series," said recently. [...] Professor Ono worked as a math consultant on a film called "The Man Who Knew Infinity," which stars Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons, and which screens this week at the Tribeca Film Festival, in New York. The movie centers on the friendship of the legendary Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (Patel) and his Cambridge University colleague G. H. Hardy (Irons), and it depicts a famous story that Hardy once told about Ramanujan. "I remember once going to see him when he was ill at Putney," Hardy said. "I had ridden in taxicab 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." One cubed plus twelve cubed, and nine cubed plus ten cubed. This was the first of what came to be known as "taxicab numbers." [...] So what does Professor Ono think of seventy-three? "I really like the number seventy-three," he said. "It is the sixth 'emirp.'" An emirp, he explained, is a prime number that remains prime when its digits are reversed. (Emirp, of course, is 'prime' spelled backward.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/FHIg7DIyTxg/golden-state-and-the-mathematical-magic-of-seventy-three

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