[seqfan] Re: OEIS in Science News

Richard Mathar mathar at strw.leidenuniv.nl
Thu Aug 12 23:55:16 CEST 2010


http://list.seqfan.eu/pipermail/seqfan/2010-August/005572.html asks

arp> Would be much more interesting if would show how OEIS helped in
arp> achieving some scientific discovery (any case for that ?)
arp> 
arp> ARP

It's easy to see that my arXiv preprints
0803.0900
0811.2434
0811.4739
0902.0789
0903.2514
0911.3434
0912.3844
1002.3844
are all directly triggered by sequences in the OEIS, that is, they would
not exist without that itching to "do something with it."

Albeit, no "scientific discovery" was made. I actually submitted
the one of 0803.0900 to a Math journal but the referee said, that, obviously,
everything written in there was already known--which is correct.
In short: measuring the achievements in units of "discoveries" (Nobel prizes,
Field Medals etc) is sort-of not catching the bulk of uses.

RJM




More information about the SeqFan mailing list