Math Trek The pattern collector The Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences outgrows its creator By Julie Rehmeyer August 6, 2010 at 9:16 pm Share this:EmailFacebookTwitterPinterestPocketRedditPrint When Neil Sloane was a young man, he started collecting objects he found beautiful. A common enough preoccupation perhaps, except for the particular objects Sloane chose: number sequences. CURIOUS SEQUENCE Sloane continues to delight in the sequences that come his way. This plot shows the first 100,000 terms of the curious “Recamán sequence.” about the sequence and its elusiveness. He has classical sequences that have captivated mathematicians for millennia, like 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13…, the prime numbers. He has tricky sequences like 1, 1, 2, 5, 14, 38, 120, 353…, the numbers of different ways of folding ever-longer strips of postage stamps. He has dull yet fundamental sequences like 0, 0, 0, 0…, the zero sequence. He even has sequences that might wreck your life. Read this one at your peril: 0, 1, 3, 6, 2, 7, 13, 20, 12,… (A005132).