Nerd to the Nth Degree

Suppose you are noodling around with math one day -- I hear that people who can use math for more than balancing their checkbooks do this all the time -- and you come up with an interesting sequence of numbers. Say it's 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21...

You would like to perhaps inform the world of your discovery, but before you do, you would like to check previous research to see if anyone has ever come up with this series of numbers before. If you were to claim it for you own and find out, say, some random 13th-century Italian who went by only one name (no, not her) had figured it out some eight hundred years ago, you might be embarrassed.

You might have to ask around of your friends who were also mathematicians, but that alone might not be enough. You might consult some reference works, but your discovery could be too obscure for them.

Enter Neil Sloane, creator and curator of the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, who will save you from humiliation and shame by pointing you to A000045 on said sequence and introduce you to Leonardo Bonacci, better known as Fibonacci. Sloane first developed his catalog on index cards in 1964 before moving first to print editions and then to an online format. Thanks to volunteer helpers, the OEIS works like a wiki database, allowing mathematicians to discover not only that someone might have discovered their discovery quite some time ago, but what other discoveries might relate to it as they help explain each other.

The interview at Quanta is pretty interesting, but one thing it didn't seem to note is that Sloane is a mathematician in charge of cataloging and managing a list of lists of numbers. It's hard to imagine a mathematician finding a happier situation.