sequences of marginal interest

[Jonathan Post]

My comment on the "Communicating Thoughts on the Web"
thread of the very heavy Mathematical Physics blog
"n-Category Cafe"

http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2006/12/communicating_thoughts_on_the.html#comments

Plato, hypertext, and OEIS; Re: Communicating Thoughts
on the Web

I strongly agree with the Thurston quotation:

"I think that our strong communal emphasis on
theorem-credits has a negative effect on mathematical
progress. If what we are accomplishing is advancing
human understanding of mathematics, then we would be
much better off recognizing and valuing a far broader
range of activity…the entire mathematical community
would become much more productive if we open our eyes
to the real values in what we are doing... What we are
producing is human understanding. We have many
different ways to understand and many different
processes that contribute to our understanding. We
will be more satisfied, more productive and happier if
we recognize and focus on this." (pp. 171-2).

Thurston W. 1994, 'On Proof and Progress in
Mathematics', Bulletin of the American Mathematical
Society 30(2): 161-177.

The notion that the purpose of mathematics is
UNDERSTANDING, not the roughly 1,000,000 theorems
published annually, was perhaps first enunciated by
Plato:

"[The] science [of Geometry] is in direct contradiction with the language
employed by its adepts... Their language is most ludicrous, for they speak
as if they were doing someting, and as if all their words were directed
towards action… [they talk] of squaring and applying and adding and the
like... whereas in fact the real object of the
subject… is knowledge ... of what eternally exists,
not of anything that comes to be this or that at some
time and ceases to be..."
[Plato, as translated and quoted by Shapiro, 67, p.7]

This is a debate topic on seqfans, the email
networking associated with the Online Encyclopedia of
Integer Sequences. This has roughly 125,000 web pages,
searchable in various ways, with an explicit linkage
to related sequences, as well as to trhe hardcopy
world of journals and books.

The debate comes down to the claim that the database
is being diluted in value by "contrived" sequences,
rather than important ones from actual publications.
The counterclaims include that these are
collaborationware, and enhance investigations by
publicizing partial results.

OEIS is limited to formatted text. But one is encouraged to link to pages of
equations, illustrations, PDF, or to run Mathematica and Maple programs
embedded in the text.

I don't want to go tangental here with Ted Nelson's
original theory of hypertext, but much can be found by
Googling "intertwingle."

Submitted by Jonathan Vos Post at December 17, 2006
7:08 PM

On 12/14/06, Joerg Arndt <arndt at jjj.de> wrote:
>
> [forgot to group-reply, sorry for breaking the thread]
>
>
> * N. J. A. Sloane <njas at research.att.com> [Dec 15. 2006 15:21]:
> > Joerg,
> > when you look up a sequence, the matches you get are
> > ranked according to certain criteria.
> >
> > so if you look up 2 3 5 8 13 21 you get the Fibonacci's first,
> > with the junk at the end
>
> OK, I see (never realized that)!
>
>
> >
> > so the less interesting sequences will only appear
> > if they are the closest match in the whole database,
> > and then you would be grateful - well, that's the idea, at least.
>
> Yes that way it's just perfect.
>
>
> >
> > in the database of real numbers that you mentioned,
> > that was swamped by polylogs, there was presumably
> > no such ranking
>
> Exactly.  And it totally gave up further searches
> because it had found something that "matches".
> I seem to recall polylogs where of much interest to
> the guy who set it up (Plouffe?).  However, this
> example can serve a a warning that even with "useful"
> stuff (with many parameters) one can kill a resource
> by "spamming" a database.
>
>
> >
> > Neil
>
> I do much searching in the stripped.gz file
> (flat not connected to the net yet).
>
> best regards,   jj
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://list.seqfan.eu/pipermail/seqfan/attachments/20061217/c3f1ebd9/attachment-0002.htm>