in case you were wondering....

here's what mathematicians do for fun.

today's exp. math seminar speaker was neil sloane, the guy who runs the online encyclopedia of integer sequences. he's from the general area and i've met him on a few occasions. as usual, after dinner we take the speaker out to dinner. dr. sloane always comes with a stack of papers and with random factoids to entertain us with... generally he'll give the start of a sequence and see if we can find the pattern.

the one that kept the whole table going for most of dinner was:

137,153,163,127,... (do you see the pattern? i was the first one to get it, but it took me a good half hour)

it's highly related to
71,42,12,83,54,...

and after i had both the one that i gave other people as a hint was
12,48,16,32,...

seriously, 2 hours of my day was spent at a thai restaurant with 7 other math people talking about integer sequences. it was a *blast*.

eric says it's probably not a good idea for me to bring paper and a pen with me tomorrow :P apparently non-math people wouldn't be as severely entertained with such things as we were tonight.

oh well.

(guesses on any of those 3 sequences without cheating?)