Originally the idea came from work I was doing for my PhD thesis at Cornell.
When I got to 10,000, I decided to put it on the Internet. At the beginning, I called it a Dictionary of Integer Sequences, and in 1973, I published a small handbook that had 2,373 sequences. O stands for “online” and that didn’t happen until 1996. Neil Sloane: Of course, it wasn’t called the OEIS in 1964. In February, Margaret Wertheim spoke by phone to Sloane, who runs the OEIS Foundation in Highland Park, New Jersey.Ĭabinet: What compelled you to begin the OEIS? Every entry has a formal catalogue number and is complete with technical definitions, links to a vast network of citations and references, a visualization of the sequence as a graph (oftentimes revealing elegant patterns), and the option to hear it played as a piece of music. As a kind of numerological version of the Oxford English Dictionary, the OEIS is the place to go if you want to learn what any sequence of digits might mean, if it has been discovered already, or if it is entirely new. In addition, the database draws a huge international audience of recreational mathematicians, people who, for pleasure, surf its delights to explore the ways in which numbers can play.
Used widely by professional mathematicians, computer theorists, and scientists, the OEIS has been called the most influential math website in the world. As the horde of sequences grew, he transferred them to punched cards, then magnetic tape, and eventually to the web, where today, more than half a century later, his Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS) has surpassed 250,000 entries. His research on neural networks generated quite a few he pressed his friends for examples and consulted mathematics textbooks. In 1964, mathematician Neil Sloane, then working on a PhD at Cornell University, began to write down interesting sequences of numbers on file cards.
And we’ve all heard about the Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…), where each term is computed by adding together the two previous terms. The smallest prime factor of 10^32768 + 1.Everyone knows a few integer sequences: the even numbers, the odd numbers, the primes. The 5th Fermat prime is also the sum of 97 consecutive This fact is extremely important to cryptographers, who useĦ5537 as a common encryption exponent. Ones, which makes computer operations much easier. In other words, the binary representation of 65537 has only 2 The largest known prime with a Hamming Weight of 2. The smallest octavan prime (form x^8 + y^8), where x and y are distinct non-prime digits, i.e., 1^8 + 4^8 = 65537. The largest non- titanic prime of form n^(2*n) + 1, (case 'monstrous moonshine' and 196560 is the kissing number for The two OEIS sequences, Mersenne primes and Fermat primes. Richard Mathar has searched throughĪll means that can be created from the existing values of Largest known prime mean of a Fermat prime and a Mersenne Mnemonic: "Fermat prime, maybe the largest." Then count the To remember the digits of 65537, recite the following The smallest prime that is the sum of a nonzero square andĪ nonzero cube in four different ways: 65537 = 122 2 + 37 3 It took Hermes 10 years and a 200-page manuscript to write down a procedure for its construction. Wantzel later proved this condition was also necessary (for prime n-gons), so the 65537-gon is currently the largest known constructible prime n-gon. Gauss proved that if n is a Fermat prime, then it is possible to construct an n-gon. Just a small proportion of regular polygons (n-gons) can be constructed with compass and straightedge. The largest known Fermat prime (2 2 4 + 1).