Report on OEIS Mar 08 2006

[N. J. A. Sloane]

Dear Seqfans:

1. Last year Mark Owen wrote a program that takes a number n > 1000
and searches the OEIS for numbers that have a large common factor with n.
Russ Cox has rewritten that program to take advantage of the new fast
lookup mechanism.  This program has now been installed - click
on the "Find friends" link at the foot of the OEIS pages.

2. I try very hard to ensure that the entries in the OEIS are correct.
Many of the entries say: "More terms from ...", or sometimes
"Corrected and extended by ...". This gives the reader more confidence.

But if there is no such comment, one wonders if the terms in an
entry have been checked by anyone other than the original author.
I would like to encourage people to send in comments like
%E A123456 Entries checked by ...., Mar 08 2006.
when appropriate.

3. The March 2 2006 issue of Nature has an amusing science-fiction story called
"Applied Mathematical Theology" by Gregory Benford.  At some point in the future
it is discovered that the Fourier coefficients of the background radiation
encode a mysterious sequence of numbers. A message from "God"?  Huge
efforts are devoted to trying to understand this sequence....

4. Our paper on A090822 has now been put on the arXiv: math.NT/0602498

5. I will be traveling Mar 15 - 27 2006, away from email, and I have a lot to
do before I leave and a lot to do at once when I return.  I would like to
ask people to keep new submissions to a minimum until mid April.
This applies especially to sequences that are base-dependent or involve
primes or "k-almost primes". Sequences of real mathematical interest
are always welcome.

6. The number of unedited sequences keeps growing.  If you would like to help,
do a search for  keyword:uned  . At present this produces 997 sequences.
(Of course it would be a waste of effort if everyone was to start editing these
from the beginning of the list!  Pick some at random.)

NJAS