A sequence whose terms are integers. The most complete printed references for such sequences are Sloane (1973) and its
update, Sloane and Plouffe (1995). Neil Sloane maintains the sequences from both
these works in a vastly expanded on-line encyclopedia known as the On-Line Encyclopedia
of Integer Sequences (http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/).
In this listing, sequences are identified by a unique 6-digit
A-number. Sequences appearing in Sloane and Plouffe (1995) are ordered lexicographically
and identified with a 4-digit M-number, and those appearing
in Sloane (1973) are identified with a 4-digit N-number.
To look up sequences by e-mail, send a message to either mailto:sequences@research.att.com
or mailto:superseeker@research.att.com
containing lines of the formlookup 5 14 42 132
... (note that spaces must be used instead of commas).
Integer sequences can be analyzed by a variety of techniques (Sloane and Plouffe 1995, p. 26), including the application of a data compression algorithm (Bell
et al. 1990), computation of the discrete
Fourier transform (Loxton 1989), or searching for a linear
recurrence equation connecting the terms or a generating
function producing them. There are also a large number of transformations which
relate integer sequences to one another, including the Euler
transform, exponential transform, Möbius transform, and others (Bower, Sloane).
In the Season 2 episode "Backscatter" (2006) of the television crime drama NUMB3RS,
math genius Charlie Eppes poses a problem of identifying an integer sequence to his
students, one of whom uses Sloane's Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences to find
it.
