Prime Curios!: 163

163
(another Prime Pages' Curiosity)

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In the April 1975 issue of Scientific American, Martin Gardner wrote (jokingly) that Ramanujan's constant (e^(

*sqrt(163))) is an integer. The name "Ramanujan's constant" was actually coined by Simon Plouffe and derives from the above April Fool's joke played by Gardner. The French mathematician Charles Hermite (1822-1901) observed this property of 163 long before Ramanujan's work on these so-called "almost integers." [Aitken]

Submitted: 1999-09-02 18:40:00; Last Modified: 2009-05-09 00:38:39.