What is the most famous sequence?

[franktaw at netscape.net]

I would have to say that the most famous sequence is the primes.

To get the most referenced inside the OEIS, just do a search that 
matches
everything (or almost everything) - I tend to use "-keyword:dead".  Be 
sure
you're sorting by references (for many searches, such as this one, the 
default
sort by relevance works, too).  You'll see the sequences sorted by how 
many
references there are.

The top ten are (with references as of 11/1/06 6 PM CST):

1666 A000040 Primes
1305 A000045 Fibonacci
1177 A000108 Catalan
1009 A000010 Totient function
 883 A000217 Triangular
 870 A000005 Number of Divisors
 808 A000203 Sum of Divisors
 674 A002275 Repunits
 616 A001358 Semiprimes
 594 A000142 Factorials

This tends to under-estimate the importance of sequences like the 
squares
and the powers of 2.  If somebody enters a formula for a sequence that
uses the totient function, they are likely to include a reference to 
A000010.
Adding a formula which squares an integer will not cause people to add 
a
reference to the squares, however.

Incidently, here are some searches, intended to identify how popular 
certain
topics are in the OEIS, with the number of sequences matched:

25267 Prime
17853 keyword:base
10904 Digit -maple:digit
 7087 Square (but this covers a lot more than just the squares)
 6384 Binomial
 5548 Power
 4904 Divisor
 4051 Polynomial
 3901 Keyword:cons
 3722 Transform
 3698 Partition
 3638 Factor
 3526 Keyword:cofr
 3448 Permutation
 3326 Pi
 3325 Fibonacci
 3308 Matrix OR Matrices (search each separately, then subtract number
        where both occur)
 3138 Group
 2601 Phi (includes both golden ratio and totient function)
 2238 Sigma
 2189 Graph
 2116 Composite
 1971 Tree
 1553 Keyword:frac
 1540 Vector
 1549 Catalan
 1511 Reverse
 1197 Factorial (but I can't search for "!" operator)
 1165 Modulo OR Modulus
 1159 Palindrome
 1051 Perfect
 1034 Semiprime

Obviously, many of these searches do not perfectly identify the 
intended
subject.

Franklin T. Adams-Watters


-----Original Message-----
From: tanyakh at TanyaKhovanova.com

What is the most famous sequence? The most basic (natural numbers?)? 
The most
simple (0,0,0, ... or 1,1,1, ...?)? The most versatile (Catalan 
numbers?)?

I would be curious to know your opinion.

I tried to check the number of Google hits for some sequence numbers. 
Here is
what I've got:
A000040 (prime numbers) 68,800
A000045 (Fibonacci)     66,000
A000108 (Catalan)       62,500
A000027 (natural)       47,500

Can someone write a program to find top ten? What is the most 
referenced
sequence inside Encyclopedia? Can we find the most hits outside 
Encyclopedia? Is
it easy to do?

Tanya

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