A121760/1: two (interesting?) sequences

[Jonathan Post]

I am one of the guilty parties who's submitted many "base" sequences and
many "primes of the form..." sequences, as well as the even less popular
"semiprimes of the form..." sequences. Although some of my seqs have "real
math" in them, NONE of the 1251 seqs that turn up by a search on my name
have received the coveted "nice." Zak is a nice guy, but I think is making
the mistake of taking rejection personally.  As a professional author, I
stopped counting after I received 5000 rejection slips or rejection letters
from editors for poems, stories, plays, articles, and the like. Artistic
success and scientific success both correlate with plunging ahead undeterred
by indifference of colleagues. I trained myself to, when receiving a
rejection letter, saying to myself "okay, nothing personal, that editor on
that day was in a bad mood," and then submitting to another market within 24
hours.  Some of my "primes of the form..." seqs which are mildly disparaged
here have been greeted with email accolades from the editors of the "Prime
Curios" eb site. One of my short stories rejected as "too downbeat" by a
major magazine ended up getting more written recommendations for the Nebula
Award for Best Science Fiction Short Story one year than competing stories
by Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury.  Mathematicians should do Math because
they can't bear not to; writers write because they must; musicians play
music because they live or die by music. The feedback from colleagues is
always useful, whether positive or negative.  Finally, one never knows which
colleague from OEIS or other venue will become a collaborator, and coauthor
a deeper work that gets accepted at a refereed journal.  It's happened to
me, and one should never preclude that by grumbling in public. The greatest
assets of the OEIS, and the web in general, is their use as
collaborationware.  Mathematics has the headline-grabbing solitaries
("Million dollar Clay prize for solving the Poincare hypothesis? No, I'll
retreat the the russian forsts") but also the intensely networked
collaborators, from Erdos on down. Never give up, Zak.  But always enjoy
Mathematics and life itself.

On 8/21/06, franktaw at netscape.net <franktaw at netscape.net> wrote:
>
> No news is bad news is not a good assumption.  Posts here often get
> ignored
> for one or more of the following reasons:
>
> * People find it uninteresting.  This may be because it really is
> mathematically
> uninteresting, or simply that nobody else in the relatively small pool
> of seqfans
> happens to be interested.
>
> * People don't understand it.  The may be because it is so badly
> written that
> nobody wants to take the time to figure it out, or because it is
> difficult and
> none of the other seqfans is familiar with it.
>
> * It happens at a bad time and people don't have time for it.
>
> * People feel that it is complete as it is and have nothing to add.
>
> You have to try to decide which one or more of these applies in a
> particular
> case.  The alternative - to have lots of people replying only to say
> "I'm not
> interested" - would be far worse.
>
> ------
> People tend to be uninterested in "base" sequences because we are
> interested in the numbers, not in how they happen to be written.  I
> think there are relatively few who are totally uninterested in all
> "base"
> sequences, but there are a vast number of such sequences in the OEIS,
> and most are really just about writing digits.
>
> There are two other classes of similarly uninteresting sequences.  One
> is the
> sequences with the "word" keyword.  The other doesn't have a keyword;
> this is the sequences which refer to real-world entities, from subway
> stops
> to fundamental constants.  However, neither of these has proliferated
> the
> way the "base" sequences have.
>
> Another class of sequences, "primes of the form ...", are interesting
> in some
> cases.  These are mathematical.  However, this has been overdone in the
> OEIS, perhaps even more than "base" sequences.  In my opionion, such
> sequences should not be submitted unless there is some reason why one
> would be interested in primes of that form.
>
> ----
> For what it's worth, I did not find these two sequences interesting.
>
> Franklin T. Adams-Watters
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: zak seidov <zakseidov at yahoo.com>
>
> ...
> if "no news = bad news" is assumed by most
> it's also not bad policy,
> but is this so?
> ...
> I'd read many messages here that "base"
> seqs are mostly non-interesting,
> but never undestood why, sorry.
> ...
>
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