Neil Sloane
Neil James Alexander Sloane is a British-American mathematician. 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.Biography
Sloane was born in Wales and brought up in Australia.
He studied at Cornell University under Nick DeClaris, Frank Rosenblatt, Frederick Jelinek and Wolfgang Heinrich Johannes Fuchs, receiving his Ph.D. in 1967. 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&T Fellow in 1998. He is also a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales, an IEEE Fellow, a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
He is a winner of a Lester R. Ford Award in 1978 and the Chauvenet Prize in 1979. In 1998 he was an Invited Speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin. In 2005 Sloane received the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal.
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. Besides mathematics, he loves rock climbing and has authored two rock-climbing guides to New Jersey.
He regularly appears in videos for Brady Haran's Youtube channel Numberphile.Selected publications
- N. J. A. Sloane, A Handbook of Integer Sequences, Academic Press, NY, 1973.
- Jessie MacWilliams and N. J. A. Sloane, The Theory of Error-Correcting Codes, Elsevier/North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1977.
- M. Harwit and N. J. A. Sloane, Hadamard Transform Optics, Academic Press, San Diego CA, 1979.
- N. J. A. Sloane and A. D. Wyner, editors, Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, IEEE Press, NY, 1993.
- N. J. A. Sloane and S. Plouffe, The Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, Academic Press, San Diego, 1995.
- J. H. Conway and N. J. A. Sloane, Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups, Springer-Verlag, NY, 1st edn., 1988; 2nd edn., 1993; 3rd ed., 1998.
- A. S. Hedayat, N. J. A. Sloane and J. Stufken, Orthogonal Arrays: Theory and Applications, Springer-Verlag, NY, 1999.
- G. Nebe, E. M. Rains and N. J. A. Sloane, Self-Dual Codes and Invariant Theory, Springer-Verlag, 2006.
