Neil Sloane

Neil James Alexander Sloane (born October 10, 1939) 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.

Sloane was born in Wales and brought up in Australia.

He studied at Cornell University, New York state, 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 2005 Sloane received the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal. In 2008 he received the Mathematical Association of America David P. Robbins award.

In 2014, to celebrate his 75th birthday, Neil Sloane shared some of his favorite integer sequences.

Besides mathematics, he loves rock climbing and has authored two rock-climbing guides to New Jersey.

• N. J. A. Sloane, A Handbook of Integer Sequences, Academic Press, NY, 1973.
• F. J. 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.

• Pless, Vera (1978). "Review: The theory of error-correcting codes, I and II, by F. J. MacWilliams and N. J. A. Sloane". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 84 (6): 1356–1359. doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1978-14578-9. 
• Guy, Richard K. (1989). "Review: Sphere packings, lattices and groups, by J. H. Conway and N. J. A. Sloane". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.). 21 (1): 142–147. doi:10.1090/s0273-0979-1989-15795-9. 
• Rogers, C. A. (1993). "Review: Sphere packings, lattices and groups, second ed., by J. H. Conway and N. J. A. Sloane". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.). 29 (2): 306–314. doi:10.1090/s0273-0979-1993-00435-x.