A few months into 2007 and already another long-standing mathematical mystery has been more-or-less put to rest. It will be hard to top Perelman's stunning proof of the legendary Poincaré Conjecture from last year, but in math and science, you never know when the next breakthrough will come.

(If you haven't already, read up on some of the incredible anecdotes about the life of the Indian genius, Ramanujan. He was truly one of a kind.)

"One of the best-known anecdotes in the history of mathematics is about a visit that [G. H.] Hardy paid to Ramanujan in the hospital in 1917."

The famous anecdote is that during one visit to Ramanujan in the hospital at Putney, Hardy mentioned that the number of the taxi cab that had brought him was 1729, which, as numbers go, Hardy thought was "rather a dull one". At this, Ramanujan perked up, and said "No, it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as a sum of two cubes in two different ways." This was the sort of thing that prompted [J. E.] Littlewood to say "every positive integer was one of [Ramanujans'] personal friends".

Amazing! I was reading about how this was unsolved just days afgo... and now, this progress!