
The Surprising Power of Neil Sloane’s Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences - pmcpinto
http://nautil.us/issue/29/scaling/how-to-build-a-search-engine-for-mathematics
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Dru89
I think I recall this website at one point existing at a domain from Bell
Labs. I came across it almost 8 years ago searching on Google for a particular
number sequence I came across in some research. The website is fascinating and
I found myself looking at sequences for hours, amazed by all of the different
ones that had been posted. This website is definitely one of the great hidden
gems on the Internet.

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Turbo_hedgehog
Sloane kept his collection first on punched cards, then in a “handbook”—A
Handbook of Integer Sequences, published in 1973, with the copyright held by
Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he started working in 1968. In 1995 he
launched an automated email lookup service called Superseeker, whereby the
curious submitted sequence queries and the database replied with answers. In
1996 he opened up his repository for public browsing at oeis.org. With the
lab’s blessing, Sloane put it up on the research division’s website.

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joshdick
In college I attended a great talk by Herb Wilf that was his foolproof plan
for writing a combinatorics paper: Basically, find two sequences on the OEIS
that look unrelated and prove a relationship between them.

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antognini
A few weeks ago I was working through the Google Foobar challenges and came
upon a problem where I had to calculate a certain function. I could calculate
the first few values of the function by hand, but was having trouble coming up
with a general expression so I plugged the sequence into OEIS. I was
pleasantly surprised to find that not only did OEIS have it, but it was
actually the very first sequence in there! (Confusingly it is numbered
A000435, not A000001.) OEIS gave me the general expression and from there I
could solve the problem!

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lovemenot
I wonder whether a meta-sequence which starts at (000)435 has yet been
registered.

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modulus1
Too many times I've 'solved' a Project Euler problem like this: 1\. Write a
program to solve the problem inefficiently. 2\. Look up the sequence F(1),
F(2), F(3) ... at oeis.org

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justifier
oeis.org is one of my favourite resources

i am equally pleased to find a sequence in my research matches one in the oeis
as well as finding ones vacant from the collection

