Neil James Alexander Sloane FLSW (born October 10, 1939) is a British-American mathematician.[2] 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 (OEIS).[3]
Neil Sloane
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Neil Sloane in 1997
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| Born | (1939-10-10) October 10, 1939 (age 84) |
| Alma mater | University of Melbourne Cornell University |
| Known for | Sphere Packing, Lattices and Groups (with J. H. Conway), The Theory of Error-Correcting Codes (with F. J. MacWilliams), and the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences |
| Awards | Chauvenet Prize (1979) Claude E. Shannon Award (1998) IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal (2005) |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Cornell University AT&T Bell Laboratories AT&T Labs |
| Doctoral advisor | Frederick Jelinek, Wolfgang Fuchs |
| Website | neilsloane |
Sloane was born in Beaumaris, Anglesey, Wales, in 1939, moving to Cowes, Isle of Wight, England in 1946. The family emigrated to Australia, arriving at the start of 1949. Sloane then moved from Melbourne to the United States in 1961.[4]
He studied at Cornell University under Nick DeClaris, Frank Rosenblatt, Frederick Jelinek and Wolfgang Heinrich Johannes Fuchs, receiving his Ph.D. in 1967.[5] His doctoral dissertation was titled Lengths of Cycle Times in Random Neural Networks. Sloane joined AT&T Bell Labs in 1968 and retired from AT&T Labs in 2012. He became an AT&TFellow in 1998. He is also a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales,[6]anIEEE Fellow, a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society,[7] and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
He is a winner of a Lester R. Ford Award in 1978[8] and the Chauvenet Prize in 1979.[8] In 1998 he was an Invited Speaker of the International Congress of MathematiciansinBerlin.[9] In 2005 Sloane received the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal.[10] In 2008 he received the Mathematical Association of America David P. Robbins Prize, and in 2013 the George Pólya Award.
In 2014, to celebrate his 75th birthday, Sloane shared some of his favorite integer sequences.[11] Besides mathematics, he loves rock climbing and has authored two rock-climbing guides to New Jersey.[12]
He regularly appears in videos for Brady Haran's YouTube channel Numberphile.[13]