Gallery: Meet the Guy Who Sorts All the World's Numbers in His Attic

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    John Smock for Quanta Magazine
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    Neil Sloane curates the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS) from his attic home office in Highland Park, N.J.
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    John Smock for Quanta Magazine
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    Formerly a children's playroom, the attic is filled with giant stacks of papers containing number sequence submissions from all over the world.
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    John Smock for Quanta Magazine
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    The OEIS, which began in 1964 as a stack of handwritten index cards, now contains more than a quarter of a million difference sequences of numbers that arise in different mathematical contexts.
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    John Smock for Quanta Magazine
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    Over the course of a more than 40-year research career at Bell Labs (later AT&T Labs), the 75-year-old Welsh native has won numerous awards for papers in the fields of combinatorics, coding theory, optics, and statistics.
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    John Smock for Quanta Magazine
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    Sloane has personally created entries for more than 170,000 sequences.
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