al-Khwarizmi

The word “algebra” comes from al-jabr in the title of his book, and “algorithm” from the Latin form of his name.

His writing helped carry Indian numerals, zero included, to the Arab world and on to Europe.

Largely self-taught, he wrote to G. H. Hardy at Cambridge in 1913 with pages of startling formulas. Hardy said some were so strange they had to be true, because nobody could have made them up.

1729 is the Hardy–Ramanujan number: the smallest number that is a sum of two cubes in two ways, 1³ + 12³ = 9³ + 10³. Ramanujan spotted it when Hardy called his taxi number dull.