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K-State Today

October 30, 2023

Beauty of number patterns to be shared at Nov. 2 Art and Math Seminar

Submitted by Natalia Rozhkovskaya

illustration of a sequence from OEIS

Professor Neil J. A. Sloane will present "Pictures from 50 Years of the OEIS" from noon to 1 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 2, at the online Art and Math Seminar. 

Sloane will share beautiful illustrations of number sequences. His examples will include patterns that look like stained glass windows, magic carpets, Christmas trees, geysers, nasty viruses and some very scary graphs.

The images are based on the patterns from the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, or OEIS. The database gives accurate and comprehensive information about more than 360,000 integer sequences. The encyclopedia receives about a million hits per day and has been cited more than 10,000 times in the mathematics literature. It has been called ''the most useful mathematics site on the web.''

Sloane started the OEIS in 1964 while he was a graduate student at Cornell University. He was a researcher at AT&T Bell Labs and AT&T Shannon Labs from 1967 to his retirement in 2012. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the Learned Society of Wales, an American Mathematical Society Fellow, an AT&T fellow, and an IEEE fellow. He has received the IEEE Hamming Medal, the MAA Chauvenet Prize, the David Robbins Prize and the Pólya Award. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1998. He has written 12 books and more than 350 papers with 160 coauthors. He has also published 22 Numberphile videos on YouTube with Brady Haran, with a combined 8 million views.

The schedule of talks can be found on the seminar webpage.

To attend the talks, please complete the registration form.