Unusual uses of OEIS sequences on GitHub || Math ∩ Programming
Unusual uses of OEIS sequences on GitHub<br>#shortform<br>#depths of OEIS<br>#oeis<br>2026-04-13<br>I went hunting for references to the OEIS in open source code,<br>and found some weird ones.<br>There are not one, but two live-coding music frameworks<br>that use OEIS sequences as a source for “anything that can be sequenced”<br>in music. I’m guessing that’s used for choosing pseudorandom melodies,<br>interesting rhythyms, or how to overlap tracks in different ways.<br>The first project is called mercury,<br>which is advertised as having “an extensive library of algorithms to generate<br>or transform numbersequences that can modulate parameters.”<br>As far as OEIS sequences, they have A000045 (Fibonacci), A006190 (Fibonacci-like),<br>A000032 (Lucas), A000129 (Pell), which are all Fibonacci-like.<br>Then there’s ziffers,<br>which is an extension for Sonic Pi. In their<br>ziffers/lib/enumerables.rb<br>there are a lot more, and weirder sequences.<br>It has the de Bruijn sequence (A000695),<br>Recamán’s sequence (A005132),<br>Thue-Morse (A010060),<br>Dress’s sequence (A001316), and many more.<br>There are a bunch of 10-adic decimal expansions like A225410,<br>the 10-adic integer x such that $x^3 = 7/9$,<br>which seems…music-theory ish?<br>And then there’s the Inventory Sequence, A342585<br>(oh goodness what is going on there), which seems very much NOT music-theory ish.<br>My real question is: how does music that relies on these weird sequences<br>actually sound? I can’t imagine a melody decided by the Inventory Sequence sounds very good.<br>Every time someone does music based on the digits of pi,<br>it’s kind of meh.<br>But let me know if you’ve tried this.<br>The Kobo e-reader has a document viewing program called Plato.<br>It has a pen tool for markup, and for whatever reason,<br>they use A000041 (the number of partitions of n) as the options for pen size.<br>No reasoning was given in the commit/PR that added this.<br>Finally, the GC wizard<br>is a geocaching app that serves as<br>“an offline tool to support geocachers with in-field mysteries and riddles.”<br>There are many hard-coded OEIS sequences and formulas in it,<br>which leads to the amusing mental image of cache hunters standing in the wilderness,<br>trying to decode a clue based on the look-and-say sequence,<br>maybe using a stick to draw formulas in the dirt.<br>Want to respond? Send me an email,<br>post a webmention,<br>or find me elsewhere on the internet.<br>This article is syndicated on:<br>Mastodon<br>Bluesky
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