Ramanujan

Srinivasa Ramanujan was a mathematical prodigy born in India in 1887. Unrecognized by Western academics for years, he was eventually discovered by G.H. Hardy, a British mathematician. In 1914, Hardy brought Ramanujan to Cambridge and they began working together. Unfortunately, Ramanujan soon became ill and died in 1919, after making important contributions to number theory.

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A story is told that Hardy came to visit Ramanujan one day in the hospital. Upon entering his friend's room, Hardy remarked that he had taken a cab with the number 1729, "not a very interesting number." "On the contrary," replied Ramanujan, "it is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number that can be expressed as the sum of two cubes in two different ways."

Indeed,

1729 = 10^3 + 9^3
1729 = 12^3 + 1^3
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For more information on Ramanujan, see the MacTutor History of Mathematics.
You can get more info on Hardy there too, and see one of the five photos of him in existence.

(1729 is also the birth year of Edmund Burke, incidently.)

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