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In Bender's Big Score, the characters encounter Al Gore driving a taxi — a hybrid taxi, naturally. Some viewers may chuckle when they notice that the license plate on the former Vice President's cab reads NOCO2. But very few will realize that the the badge number on another cab, 87539319, is also a joke.
Math geeks, however, will find that number hilarious because of something that happened about a century ago. The British mathematician G.H. Hardy was paying a call on the Indian mathematician Srinivisa Ramanujan. "I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one," Hardy later recalled. Ramanujan disagreed. "It is a very interesting number," he insisted. "It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways."
The number 1729 can be expressed as 13 + 123 or it can be expressed as 93 + 103. The number 87539319 can be expressed as the sum of two cubes in three different ways, as 1673 + 4363 or as 2283 + 4233, or 2553 + 4143. Much scholarly research has since been dedicated to so-called taxicab numbers like these. Which means that a tiny percentage of mathematically inclined Futurama viewers will get a chuckle when they see a cartoon taxi that has a taxicab number printed on it.
just to tell you i stole this example from this website
www.futuramamath.com
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