How to Build a Search Engine for Mathematics
On the average summer Saturday, the mathematician Neil Sloane woke up to a crisis. “There are always crises,” he said— albeit crises of the teapot tempest variety. One Saturday over breakfast, he faced an inbox message titled “edits from outer space.” Without authorization, a contributor in France had deleted an entry in Sloane’s Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, which, like Wikipedia, is powered by volunteer contributors and editors.
But everyday, tending his encyclopedia like a garden, weeding and pruning and planting, Sloane also delights in the more pleasant surprises. On that same Saturday morning, for instance, a nice new sequence arrived. This specimen was governed by a rule that, as Sloane explained with signature bouncy exuberance, “gives you a list of numbers, only 16 numbers, and the biggest is 999,999,000,000. Six nines and six zeroes. Which is pretty amazing! Out of the blue we end up with this number.”
And indeed, it was a blue-sky day that Saturday at Sloane’s house in Highland Park, New Jersey, with perfect poufs of clouds and cicadas singing as temperatures neared their seasonal crescendo, … 82, 85, 86, 90, 94, 95. Sloane lives in a library as much as a house (crossed with a curiosity cabinet of ephemera), bookshelves insulating every room, with ring theory and number theory climbing the staircase from the second floor to his attic study. The attic is command central for the encyclopedia, which is
