OEIS = 50
Neil Sloane and the OEIS (Google-translated from the French original paper to be submitted soon)
The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS) turns 50 this year. More precisely, the 50th anniversary of the publication of A Handbook of Integer Sequences, which was published by Academic Press in 1973. It is still available second-hand for fetishists (the undersigned) but amateurs will profit from its first 38 pages here – the diagrams, drawings and explanations alone are worth seeing.
The Handbook was published by the Anglo-American mathematician Neil Sloane, the latter wishing to keep at hand interesting sequences of numbers, likely to enlighten researchers and scientists like him. The success was immediate, and the author was offered by mail sequences present in fields as diverse as physics and chemistry, juggling and New York subway stations, the color of piano keys and IQ tests! If the Handbook contained only 2,372 entries, the paper Encyclopedia which succeeded it in 1995 largely doubled this figure on nearly 600 pages. This edition also bore the name of Simon Plouffe, an outstanding Canadian-French mathematician who assisted Neil Sloane in his work, found a number of formulas linking the terms of sequences together, explored publications from Europe – Neil and Simon admired, for example, the mathematical works of what they called the "French School", namely those of C. Banderier, F. Bergeron, Michel Bousquet, Mireille Bousquet-Mélou, A. Denise, S. Dulucq, P. Flajolet, D. Gardy, D. Gouyou-Beauchamps, A. Jehanne, Cedric Lamathe, Gilles Schaeffer...
Contributions and updates accelerated further. Neil Sloane had to transfer the 10,000 suites he had (that is more than a ton of punched cards and paper in his office at AT&T Bell Laboratories!) to the Internet. Thus, when the Internet was still very young, in 1996 the OEIS as we know it today was born. For the record, the success of the online version was such that the servers of Bell Laboratories tripped in 2004 – to the great pride of the Mathematics and Statistics department which had never had so many visits!
As I am writing this, the OEIS has over 360,000 entries. Neil Sloane continues to develop and oversee this Leviathan – assisted by an armada of 170 volunteer editors. The OEIS receives more than a million visits per day, swells daily with about fifty updates and about forty new entries, sees 500 new submissions of sequences every week. It has been cited more than 10,000 times in scientific publications around the world.
But the OEIS, beyond the knowledge tool, is a source of pleasure. The search engine on its home page is childishly simple. You type a few numbers in a large central box and the base tells you if these numbers appear one behind the other in a sequence already recorded. It is free, you are not asked to register with a password cluttered with numbers, Greek letters, and smileys, you do not have to decrypt any Captcha displaying gondolas or scooters and you keep the blood type of your grandmother for other uses. In the event of a positive answer, you notice that your numbers are part of an existing sequence or several, which are equipped with formulas, links to scientific publications, computer programs, extraordinary lists of integers, graphs, images and even sounds! You feel less alone, we reach out to you, we help you think about the numbers you have just submitted... and you are quickly plunging into the fabulous meanders of a multiverse much richer than that of the Daniels' last Oscar: Everything Everywhere All at Once is the exact definition of the OEIS!
Neil Sloane's career seems marked by insularity. He was born in Beaumaris (on an island off the Welsh coast), moved at the age of 7 for Ynys Wyth (47 points in Scrabble and prime number – it's the Isle of Wight, that of the famous music festival), then left for 10 years for the largest island in the world, Australia. These successive jumps evoke for me the wonderful sequence called Stepping Stones (A337663) also visible on YouTube.
Neil Sloane (online ales & lone aliens – the word "anagram" mobilizes nearly 200 sequences) finally left Australia at the age of 21 for the mainland of Cornell University in the United States. He graduated there in 1967 and joined the famous AT&T Bell Labs the following year. It was there that he published the works that would be dear to him throughout his life, including Theory of Error-Correcting Codes (1977 at Elsevier), Hadamard Transform Optics (1979 at Academic Press) and what was called the "Bible of Stacking of Spheres” in 1988 at Springer-Verlag, Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups, co-written with John Conway (the latter allowing the boss of the OEIS to have an Erdös number of 2).
Today the OEIS has become a foundation. Neil Sloane, 83 (prime number still), is seeking $3 million (prime digit) to sustain it, pay for a managing director, a fixed team of editors, and all hosting and IT maintenance costs.
It is quite a slope to climb, like some sequences whose graph evokes the Denali, in Alaska, or the Matterhorn in Europe. But our man (aloes linen) will achieve it this year, he thinks. He is equipped, practices climbing, moreover published a book on the subject in the year 2000 with his friend Paul Nick at Falcon Publishing (Rock Climbing, New Jersey), his physical form and his energy seem inexhaustible.
During the interview we offered him by e-mail, we asked Neil Sloane if the OEIS had changed his life. He thought about it and then sent: “Not so much”. We were stunned by the Bartleby side of his response: the man who changed the (north) face of mathematics and brought whole strings of enthusiasts, students, and scholars to it considers the OEIS a hobby, an activity on the sidelines of his real work as a mathematician. Encyclopedia or not, his fundamental research activity occupied him all his life and continues to motivate him above all else. That is also why we love him.
© Éric Angelini for Tangente Magazine, March 27, 2023
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