5 ms·
The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences
- petercooper 13y agoIt's weird because this awesome site (well worth checking out) has been submitted about 10 times here and never got any comments except for this time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2496629 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2496629 .. it's like there's not much to say about integer sequences or something ;-) Quippery aside, there was an interesting question on Mathematics Stack Exchange about Arthur C Clarke's The 9 Billion Names of God and the OEIS: http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/34237/the-9-billion-names-of-god http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/34237/the-9-billion-...
- brianpgordon 13y agoThat site is more than 15 years old. I don't know how anyone is still discovering it for the first time.
- crntaylor 13y agoToday I listened to the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust for the first time. It was released in 1972. Is it really that bewildering to you that not everyone has seen everything that exists already?
- ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago"You're one of today's lucky 10,000!" http://xkcd.com/1053/ http://xkcd.com/1053/
- jamesbritt 13y agoWow. So what did you think? (I heard the album a year or so after it came out. Curious how it sounds to someone today.)
- crntaylor 13y agoI really enjoyed it. It's an odd experience, listening to an album that old and that well known for the first time, because almost inevitably you will have heard some of the songs before without realising where they were from. A couple of times I recognized intros or riffs but couldn't quite place them - probably from movies, advertisements, or just hearing them on the radio. You also have to try and shed yourself of the intervening 40 years of musical and social development, to try and get a sense of why this album created such a buzz when it was released for the first time (context - I'm about 30 years old, so I wasn't even born until 10 years after this was released, and wasn't socially/musically aware until about 25 years after it came out.)
- fdej 13y agoNew people are born every day.
- ColinDabritz 13y agoI rather like XKCDs "Lucky Ten Thousand" on this subject. The idea is that simply because of birth rate for everything "everyone knows" there are an average 10,000 people per day are discovering it for the first time. From http://xkcd.com/1053/ http://xkcd.com/1053/ I've come across the archive before, but it's still neat.
- leviself 13y agoI was a little surprised to see this getting traction on HN too. It would be like seeing a link to the Wayback Machine or Wolfram Alpha with no qualification.
- Groxx 13y agofwiw I've never even heard of anything like this.
- jlgreco 13y agoIf you make a plot of how many different sequences a particular number appears in in this database, a rather interesting pattern emerges. Some numbers appear frequently, as you would expect (primes, numbers 1 off from prime, etc) while others appear infrequently, but in general there is a downward trend as the numbers become larger. That is all expected; what isn't expected is that there seems to be a break between common numbers and uncommon numbers. A very distinct break. The theory is that social prejudices towards certain bases and certain numbers have caused mathematicians to find more sequences with numbers that they "like" than those that they don't. So for example, numbers that look neat in base 10, say "3333" or "4444" get special treatment and tend to occur in more sequences. The paper on this weird distribution is rather accessible, I recommend it: http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.4470 http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.4470 Page 4 has the pretty plot.
- dmunoz 13y agoNumberphile did an episode about Sloane's Gap [0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YysNM2JoFo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YysNM2JoFo
- jlgreco 13y agoAye, the Numberphile video is fantastic; that's actually where I first found out about this. :) All their videos tend to be great; they're done by the same film-maker that does the "Periodic Videos" youtube channel, Brady Haran.
- baddox 13y agoI always enjoy the self-referential sequences. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-Line_Encyclopedia_of_Integer_Sequences#Self-referential_sequences http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-Line_Encyclopedia_of_Integer...
- alexcweiner 13y agoMy one professor is a rather big fan of it. several students in my class have sequences on it, and some are even "sequence" administrators
- qdot76367 13y agoI had the honor of having lunch with Dr. Sloane once. By the end, the paper tablecloth was COVERED in sequences scrawled in pen. He was grinning and telling everyone at the table about different properties and new sequences being worked on. OEIS was awesome before that, but seeing how much he really, really loves sequences made it even better. You can feel the love between every comma.
- leif 13y agoThis warms my heart.
- PilateDeGuerre 13y agoAn encyclopedia? Is that like a wiki? I kid, I kid
- kroger 13y agoI spent hours on the OEIS having fun. I like to convert numerical sequencies to sound to see how they sound. Some sound bad but some sound pretty good. I wrote a little bit about this here: http://pedrokroger.net/2013/05/how-does-pascals-triangle-sound/ http://pedrokroger.net/2013/05/how-does-pascals-triangle-sou...
- blueblob 13y agoThis site could be much nicer if they used javascript to render the latex equations, most of them are already in latex anyways (without the $ signs).