[seqfan] Re: wanted application of OEIS for man-in-street

Marc LeBrun mlb at well.com
Wed Jul 21 04:55:56 CEST 2010


>="N. J. A. Sloane" <njas at research.att.com>
> Does anyone have an argument why the man-in-the-street
> should care about the OEIS?

T. C. Mits should care about the OEIS because he enjoys the fruits of
science.  Often scientific work produces lists of numbers, and the OEIS can
be used by scientists to see if they have invented something new, or to find
out who else has run across those numbers, and look up information about
them.  This is really useful because you *only* need to look up the numbers,
and you can find out all sorts of other knowledge.  It is a very special
kind of scientific encyclopedia because you don't even have to know the
language, since it is written in numbers.  Also, sometimes the OEIS sparks
discoveries of new and surprising connections between subjects that
scientists then explore further.  People all over the Earth are contributing
to the OEIS, and everyone in the world can use it, so it is a shared,
cooperative, growing, global knowledge resource for all humanity.






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