NJAS receives Robbins Prize

[T. D. Noe]

This is the excerpt
(for those with slow internet).
My hat is off and thrown to sky
to NJAS, OEIS, and all of us!!!
zak
 
MATHEMATICAL ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA
DAVID P. ROBBINS PRIZE
In 2005 the family of David P. Robbins gave the
Mathematical Association of
America funds suffi cient to support a prize honoring
the author or authors of a
paper reporting on novel research in algebra,
combinatorics, or discrete mathematics.
The prize of $5,000 is awarded every third year. David
Robbins spent
most of his career on the research staff at the
Institute for Defense Analyses-
Center for Communications Research (IDA-CCR) in
Princeton. He exhibited
extraordinary creativity and brilliance in his
classifi ed work while also fi nding
time to make major contributions in combinatorics,
notably to the proof of the
MacDonald Conjecture and to the discovery of
conjectural relationships between
plane partitions and alternating sign matrices. The
2008 prize is the fi rst awarded
by the Mathematical Association of America.
Citation
Neil J. A. Sloane
“The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences,”
Notices of the American Mathematical
Society 50 (2003), 912–915.
The MAA David P. Robbins Prize is for “a paper
reporting on novel research in
algebra, combinatorics, or discrete mathematics.” For
the fi rst prize, we have
chosen Neil Sloane’s most recent paper describing his
ongoing “on-line encyclopedia
of integer sequences (OEIS)” efforts.
Although not quite a research paper in the usual
sense, the paper describes an
extraordinary research tool that has had an impact on
mathematics far beyond
that of almost any paper, especially in the areas that
David Robbins cared so
much about. In addition, this work is in many ways
deeply in tune with Robbins’s
approach to mathematics; i.e., when in doubt, compute
some examples!
The OEIS enables mathematicians to identify sequences
from a few (perhaps
very few) terms, giving them access to a wealth of
information that might immediately
point their research in useful directions. One of the
most distinctive
instances is when research in one area is connected to
research in a completely
unrelated area. In a random recent example, an
algebraic geometer found that
a sequence of dimensions, each diffi cult to compute,
was the same sequence of
numbers that arose in a topological context in
physics. The interaction between
the two of them led to a proof of the equivalence of
the sequences, a more effi -
cient algorithm to compute the sequence, and a joint
paper. The importance and
pervasiveness of this tool is evident from the number
and diversity of papers that
cite the OEIS.
63
Another measure of its importance comes from the fact
that the database has
more than 120,000 entries, an active editorial board
with twenty-five members,
and a Wikipedia entry. The accessibility of the
project is evident from the fact
that the list of major contributors includes
undergraduates and from the fact that
the tool is of genuine interest to students and
amateur mathematicians as well as
researchers.
The scale of the impact of this tool, as well as its
combinatorial tilt and strong
experimental fl avor, make it especially appropriate
to recognize by giving the
fi rst MAA Robbins Prize to Neil J. A. Sloane for his
paper and the research that
it describes.
Biographical Note
Neil J. A. Sloane received his Ph.D. in electrical
engineering from Cornell
University in 1967. After two years as an assistant
professor there, he joined
AT&T Bell Labs (now AT&T Shannon Labs), where he has
been ever since. He
is the author or coauthor of books on error-correcting
codes, sphere packing,
integer sequences, optics, and rock climbing. He is a
member of the National
Academy of Engineering, an AT&T Fellow, and an IEEE
Fellow. He has received
numerous awards, including the Chauvenet Prize of the
MAA, the IEEE
Hamming Medal, and the Shannon Award of the IEEE
Information Theory
Society.
Response from Neil J. A. Sloane
This is a very great honor, especially as David
Robbins is responsible for one of
the most famous sequences in “The On-Line Encyclopedia
of Integer Sequences,”
the Robbins numbers 1, 2, 7, 42, 429, 7436, …, entry
A5130. I should like to
thank the thousands of volunteers who have contributed
to the OEIS over the
years by sending in sequences, correcting or extending
entries, and helping with
the computer programs that keep it running. Without
their help the OEIS would
not exist in its present form. I should also like to
thank AT&T for supporting this
work for nearly forty years. Two things above all have
made the forty years of
work worthwhile: the ever-increasing list of articles
that acknowledge help from
the OEIS and the pleasure of seeing new sequences as
they arrive (e.g., 1, 9, 9, 5,
5, 9, 9, 5, 5, 9, 1, 3 ..., A131744!).


--- "T. D. Noe" <noe at sspectra.com> wrote:

> Dear SeqFans:
> 
> As noted in
> http://www.ams.org/ams/prizebooklet-2008.pdf, today
> Neil
> received the first David R. Robbins Prize, which
> honors "the author or
> authors of a
> paper reporting on novel research in algebra,
> combinatorics, or discrete mathe-
> matics."  Neil's 2003 paper, in Notices of the AMS,
> describes OEIS.
> 
> My hat is off to NJAS!  I wish I could have been at
> the San Diego meeting
> today.
> 
> Tony
> 
> 



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