Neil J. A. Sloane

"The encyclopedia of integer sequences contains more than 5,000 integer sequences, arranged for easy reference, with more than half never before been catalogued. In addition to having more than double the material of Sloane's A Handbook of Integer Sequences, this encyclopedia gives the name, mathematical description, and citations to literature for each sequence. It includes essays on origins, uses, and connections, with interesting diagrams or illustrations. More than a table, this is an introduction to the field, showing readers how to identify and work with sequences. It includes an extensive bibliography of current and classical references. An index to all the sequences in the book is also available separately on disk in Macintosh and IBM formats."--Book cover.

The second edition of this timely, definitive, and popular book continues to pursue the question: what is the most efficient way to pack a large number of equal spheres in n-dimensional Euclidean space? The authors also continue to examine related problems such as the kissing number problem, the covering problem, the quantizing problem, and the classification of lattices and quadratic forms. Like the first edition, the second edition describes the applications of these questions to other areas of mathematics and science such as number theory, coding theory, group theory, analog-to-digital conversion and data compression, n-dimensional crystallography, and dual theory and superstring theory in physics. Results as of 1992 have been added to the text, and the extensive bibliography - itself a contribution to the field - is supplemented with approximately 450 new entries.

This is the first book on the subject since its introduction more than fifty years ago, and it can be used as a graduate text or as a reference work. It features all of the key results, many very useful tables, and a large number of research problems. The book will be of interest to those interested in one of the most fascinating areas of discrete mathematics, connected to statistics and coding theory, with applications to computer science and cryptography. It will be useful for anyone who is running experiments, whether in a chemistry lab or a manufacturing plant (trying to make those alloys stronger), or in agricultural or medical research. Sam Hedayat is Professor of Statistics and Senior Scholar in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois, Chicago. Neil J.A. Sloane is with AT&T Bell Labs (now AT&T Labs). John Stufken is Professor Statistics at Iowa State University.