More whimsical OEIS sequences

Here are some more whimsical OEIS sequences I came across.

XKCD 2016 joked that “OEIS keeps rejecting my submissions,” including one that gives “Integers in increasing order of width when printed in Helvetica.” Well, two days after that comic was published (2018-07-09), Hugo Pfoertner published A316600, with a very precise definition. Then he did Arial.

Randall Munroe missed a huge opportunity to commit to his bit and actually try to submit some of his sequences before publishing the comic. Also, the graph for the sequence is rather fun.

A366192 has a fun little secret. It’s formally the complement of Cantor’s sequence A352911, which enumerates reduced fractions to demonstrate their countability. In other words, A366192 are all of the “non-reduced” fractions.

Peter Luschny, who originally submitted this sequence, titled it “Peter’s List: Fractions nobody needs (because they can be reduced to a simpler form).” In the history he gave the justification: “Georg has such a nice sequence (A352911), I wanted one like that too…” I like that Peter is on a first-name basis with Cantor.

There’s the “screaming sequence” A325911, which are numbers whose hex representation is all “AAAAAA…” There are the James Bond primes, A386240, which all have “007” in their decimal representation.

There are lots of random number tables, like A259233, the random table of bytes used by Doom; or A357907, the internal state of the ZX81’s RNG.

There is a “nonsense sequence”, which, I’m still not quite sure what it’s about.

Then there are a lot of sequences about devils and “The Beast”? Like A115983 which are primes that have 666 digits. Or A186086 and A131645, which have 666 as a particular substring. Somehow I shudder to think what current-day children would do with the prime 76667.

Also, apparently the devil has a fax number? It’s 667. A138563 are the “Beastly fax numbers.” Neil Sloane described it in an interview, as a sequence whose including in OEIS would be “going too far” towards whimsy.

A few moments later in the interview, he remembered, “Actually, the fax numbers of the beast are in. I sent in the sequence myself.”

OEIS entries have a keyword table. When looking at these sequences, I noticed most share a keyword of “dumb.” Indeed, you can search OEIS for dumb sequences and maybe they should rename that keyword to “whimsical.”