Neil Sloane

Neil Sloane

Neil James Alexander Sloane (born October 10, 1939) is a British-U.S. mathematician. His major contributions are in the fields of combinatorics, error-correcting codes, and sphere packing. Sloane is best known for being the creator and maintainer of the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.

He studied at Cornell University under Nick DeClaris, Frank Rosenblatt, Frederick Jelinek and Wolfgang Heinrich Johannes Fuchs, receiving his Ph.D. in 1967. His doctoral dissertation was titled Lengths of Cycle Times in Random Neural Networks. Sloane joined AT&T Bell Labs in 1968. He became an AT&T Fellow in 1998. He is also an IEEE Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

His Erdős number is 2, since he coauthored Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups with John Horton Conway. He has also collaborated with at least seven other Erdős coauthors. He is a winner of the Chauvenet Prize. In 2005 Sloane received the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal. In 2008 he received the Mathematical Association of America David P. Robbins award.

Besides mathematics, he loves rock climbing and has authored two rock-climbing guides to New Jersey.