On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences - History

History

Neil Sloane started collecting integer sequences as a graduate student in 1965 to support his work in combinatorics. The database was at first stored on punch cards. He published selections from the database in book form twice:

1. A Handbook of Integer Sequences (1973, ISBN 0-12-648550-X), containing 2,372 sequences in lexicographic order and assigned numbers from 1 to 2372.
2. The Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences with Simon Plouffe (1995, ISBN 0-12-558630-2), containing 5,488 sequences and assigned M-numbers from M0000 to M5487. The Encyclopedia includes the references to the corresponding sequences (which may differ in their few initial terms) in A Handbook of Integer Sequences as N-numbers from N0001 to N2372 (instead of 1 to 2372.) The Encyclopedia includes the A-numbers that are used in the OEIS, whereas the Handbook did not.

These books were well received and, especially after the second publication, mathematicians supplied Sloane with a steady flow of new sequences. The collection became unmanageable in book form, and when the database had reached 16,000 entries Sloane decided to go online—first as an e-mail service (August 1994), and soon after as a web site (1996). As a spin-off from the database work, Sloane founded the Journal of Integer Sequences in 1998. The database continues to grow at a rate of some 10,000 entries a year. Sloane has personally managed 'his' sequences for almost 40 years, but starting in 2002, a board of associate editors and volunteers has helped maintain the database. In 2004, Sloane celebrated the addition of the 100,000th sequence to the database,  A100000, which counts the marks on the Ishango bone. In 2006, the user interface was overhauled and more advanced search capabilities were added. In 2010 an OEIS wiki at OEIS.org was created to simplify the collaboration of the OEIS editors and contributors. The 200,000th sequence,  A200000, was added to the database in November 2011; it was initially entered as A200715, and moved to A200000 after a week of discussion on the SeqFan mailing list, following a proposal by OEIS Editor-in-Chief Charles Greathouse to choose a special sequence for A200000.