The Connoisseur of Number Sequences

An anonymous reader writes: 75-year-old Neil Sloane is considered by many to be one of the most influential mathematicians of our time, not because of the theorems he's proved, but because of his creation: The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS). Quanta Magazine reports: "This giant repository, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, contains more than a quarter of a million different sequences of numbers that arise in different mathematical contexts, such as the prime numbers (2, 3, 5, 7, 11 ) or the Fibonacci sequence (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 ). What's the greatest number of cake slices that can be made with n cuts? Look up sequence A000125 in the OEIS. How many chess positions can be created in n moves? That's sequence A048987. The number of ways to arrange n circles in a plane, with only two crossing at any given point, is A250001. That sequence just joined the collection a few months ago. So far, only its first four terms are known; if you can figure out the fifth, Sloane will want to hear from you."

Comments

50th anniversary "on-line"?

[tverbeek]

If you're wondering how an "on-line" collection celebrated its 50th anniversary recently: the collection was begun in 1964; it was made available via the Internet starting in 1996.