[seqfan] Re: author field

Antti Karttunen antti.karttunen at gmail.com
Wed Oct 28 22:20:06 CET 2009


On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 5:18 PM, <seqfan-request at list.seqfan.eu> wrote:
>
>
> Message: 9
> Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:16:12 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Tanya Khovanova <mathoflove-seqfan at yahoo.com>
> Subject: [seqfan]  author field
> To: Sequence Fanatics Discussion list <seqfan at list.seqfan.eu>
> Message-ID: <453107.75660.qm at web65409.mail.ac4.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> 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.
>

I think they were invented several times independently.
E.g., by Pingala from India, before the common era:
See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingala
and
http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0703658


>
> On the other hand, most of my sequences I invented myself.
>

There are also a couple of sequences I "invented" by myself, and then
later somebody else
added a comment like:

"This table was known to the Chinese mathematician Ming An-Tu, who
gave the following recurrence in the 1730s."

or:

"REFERENCES: (Bernard) de? Frenicle (de Bessy), studying Pythagorean
triangles: Methode pour trouver ...; in Divers ouvrages de
mathematique et de physique par Messieurs de l'Academie Royale des
Sciences, In-folio, (4)+6+519 pages, Paris, 1693."

I think this is one of the nicest "serendipitous results" of OEIS. To
find that somebody thought this same problem
three hundred years ago, or that it surfaces in the wholly different context.
(One reason I don't see much idea in concocting very contrived or
artificial sequences: there is just no contact
with anything else!)

> So I suggest to change the author field to "author/submitter".
>

I like the "contributor" that somebody suggested.

>
> Tanya
>


Antti




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