[seqfan] Re: author field

[Alonso Del Arte]

Generally, yes. You can't patent or copyright the powers of two, Pascal's
triangle, the Fibonacci numbers, solutions to Znám's problem, etc. but you
can copyright a paper about them or patent a device that takes advantage of
their properties. I suppose that there might be some cases in the OEIS where
the submitter had some choice as to which numbers to use in order
to achieve a particular purpose, much as a poet may sometimes have two words
to choose from to use at a particular line in a poem. But generally the
sequences already exist and we're just discovering them, maybe for the first
time, maybe the thousandth time.

Al


On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 2:36 PM, Tanya Khovanova <
mathoflove-seqfan at yahoo.com> wrote:

> In a way you are saying that the author is not the author of a particular
> sequence but the author of the whole submission page about this sequence.
> Right?
>
> --- On Wed, 10/28/09, Alonso Del Arte <alonso.delarte at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > From: Alonso Del Arte <alonso.delarte at gmail.com>
> > Subject: [seqfan] Re: author field
> > To: "Sequence Fanatics Discussion list" <seqfan at list.seqfan.eu>
> > Date: Wednesday, October 28, 2009, 1:36 PM
>  > 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
>