`re' difficulty?

[Patrick Phalen]

[François Pinard, on Wed, 20 Oct 1999]:
:: akuchlin at mems-exchange.org (Andrew M. Kuchling) writes:
:: 
:: > I've always wondered why he considered 37 helpful.
:: 
:: Because it is a factor of any number made up by repeating any single digit
:: some multiple of three times?  (v.g. 111, 222222, 333333333, 444444444444)

François,

I must say I've thoroughly enjoyed your recent contributions to this
list! I'm going to choose to imagine that you arrived at the answer
above by pure intuition. It of course reminds one of the famous story
told by G. H. Hardy:

Hardy went to visit Ramanujan in the hospital and remarked that his
taxicab had had a particularly dull number: 1729.

Ramanujan immediately remarked, "Oh no, Hardy. It is a very interesting
number indeed. It is the least number that can be written as the sum of
two squares in two different ways."