[seqfan] Re: author field

[Alonso Del Arte]

Dear Tanya,

I used to think the same way, e.g., "Neil Sloane and Mira Bernstein didn't
invent Pascal's triangle." Neither did Pascal, for that matter. Can we ever
be sure that the sequence we just submitted was never thought of by the
ancients?

The submitters still deserve authorial credit. Even if the numbers have been
known since ancient times, and even though the OEIS format could be
considered restrictive, the submitters are still making decisions as to how
to present the sequence: what words to describe it with, which formulas to
give and how to label the variables, what examples to use, what references
to cite, etc. It's in a way not that different from writing a paper: You
write a paper on Pascal's triangle, you're the author of that paper even
though the topic is ancient.

Al

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 11:16 AM, Tanya Khovanova <
mathoflove-seqfan at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Dear SeqFans,
>
> Looking at the wiki page of a sequence, I realized that the author field
> became bold and bothers me more than before. Very often people who submit a
> sequence are not the authors of the sequence.
>
> For example, I submitted the sequence
> http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/A122726 of sociable numbers.
> This is a very old sequence, it was just missing in the OEIS. And, of
> course, Fibonacci is the author of the Fibonacci sequence.
>
> On the other hand, most of my sequences I invented myself.
>
> So I suggest to change the author field to "author/submitter".
>
> Tanya
>
>
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