More application in math (Was: Categories)

[Jonathan Post]

What is the OEIS for?  What i Math about? Related questions.

I am 100% grateful to Dr, Neil J. A. Sloane.  The OEIS helped turn me back
into a Mathematician after having wandered into other fields for 2/3 of my
life so far.

My bias is thus that I am both older (a career in aerospace, start-up
high-tech company executive management, and other areas), and young again.
As a revitalized student of Mathematics, with the cunning of middle age, and
the discipline that I lacked when young, I learn joyfully.

With that bias, the default comment: " Arises from ..." is tantalizing
rather than satisfying.  Not everyone who uses the OEIS has access to a
university library to read the journals cited, especially if the journals
are obscure and not available electronically.  Hence I err on the side of
wordiness in my comments (such as the one cited earlier on this thread, now
numbered as A124153) so as to make the sequences better stand on their own
as contextual units, with some educational value.

I am not advocating what others should do, merely saying why I mildly
disagree with a "less is more" philosophy of comments. This also comes from
my 40 years of working with computer software.  I think it better to
copiously comment one's programming source code. It is agony (albeit
sometime highly paid agony) to figure out what a programmer meant in legacy
code, after the programmer has retired decades ago. I've had to
reverse-engineer the "Day-Of-Launch" code that Rockwell used for NASA in
deciding whether or not it was safe to launch the Space Shuttle.  Then had
to testify to Columbia Accident Investigation Board.

Math is not usually life or death; but it can be in mission-critical
engineering. Math is somehow simultaneously about nothing but itself
[Formalism], about the universe [Realism], about a deeper and more
fundamental universe [Platonic Idealism], and about our own personal quest
for self-understanding and wisdom. Again I thank NJAS and OEIS for assisting
me in the multiquest!

-- Jonathan

On 12/1/06, N. J. A. Sloane <njas at research.att.com> wrote:
>
> Martin said:
>
> OEIS suffers from some of these
> problems too, e.g. some sequences do not give any
> context.  This could be how the sequence is used, or
> how it was reached.  What is the best way to improve
> this aspect of OEIS?
>
> Me:  this is what the Comments fields are for.
> %C A123456 Arises from a problem in complexity of filtering - see the
> Jones reference.
>
> etc etc
>
> Neil
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://list.seqfan.eu/pipermail/seqfan/attachments/20061202/c2fd63b0/attachment-0003.htm>