[seqfan] Re: Another surprising omission from OEIS

[Andrew Weimholt]

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 8:08 AM, Alonso Del Arte
<alonso.delarte at gmail.com> wrote:
> The title of this thread has bothered me since I read the first post in it.
> I think the reason is that I don't find the omission of a keyword:base
> sequence surprising at all. Most math amateurs, if they stick to it,
> eventually lose interest in base sequences. Most professional mathematicians
> probably feel that they must specialize in the topic of radix representation
> if they're going to give it any significant portion of their time. Modular
> arithmetic, on the other hand, is so fundamental to number theory that the
> absence of the orderly numbers from the OEIS for so long I do find genuinely
> surprising. Well, that's just my opinion, for what it's worth.
>
> Al

I don't find "base" sequences as interesting either, especially when
only one base (usually base 10) is considered.
I feel that if you are going to look for numbers with certain
syntactical properties (such as repdigits, palindromes, etc) then why
not do the search in all bases.

By the way, my interpretation of the "base" keyword (Neil, correct me
if I am wrong) is that it applies to sequences which use a single base
in their definition (so that if you change the base, the sequence will
contain a different set of terms). Sequences which cover all the bases
are not really "base" sequences (which is why I didn't add the "base"
keyword to these submissions).
The OEIS help file for keywords says "base: dependent on base used for
sequence", which seems to support my interpretation.

Andrew