Today was a cubic sort of day, where everything I do seems to lead me back to cubes. First, I happened to chance upon
an article about the sale of a Picasso painting, and the unfortunate story of the owner who put his elbow through the canvas just hours before it was due to be transferred to its new owner. As you might have guessed, that deal was cancelled.
Moments later, I ended up
here, reading about the Picasso exhibit at the Whitney and how he influenced art in the Western world, and how the cubist movement shaped art for years to come. Two Picasso stories is not all that odd, but the next story just served to tie it all together.
The next random tidbit I came across led me to a
wikipedia entry on the seemingly innocuous number 1729. Now what is interesting about this number is that it is the Hardy-Ramanujan number, known as such because it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways (1729 = 1^3 + 12^3 = 9^3 + 10^3). Yet another cube shows up in the course of 10 minutes. I was intrigued.
As an aside, nothing more has happened since with cubes other than a fill up of the ice tray, but it was still an interesting set of articles to run across in the space of a few minutes.
Update: Taking a walk later that evening I happened to pass by the Metropolitan Museum, and what should be hanging on the outside, but a banner advertising a Picasso exhibit. Small wonders.
4:03 PM