Talk:Timeline of the OEIS

Forecast future

I moved this section here from the page:

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• 2012 The two hundred thousandth sequence is added (assuming pace equal to the first decade).
• 2013 An OEIS app for the iPhone is unveiled. It quickly becomes the most downloaded app among scientists (but among the general population it lags hundreds of places behind an app that finds the best weed deal within a user-specified radius).
• 2020 The OEIS is one of the top 3 most visited Web resources for mathematics, second only to Mathworld.
• 2035 Lower bound prediction for adding millionth sequence (this is sooner than a prediction assuming the time to add another hundred thousand sequences gradually shortens by 1 year each time).
• 2045 The 50th anniversary reprinting of the Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences makes the New York Times bestseller list if celebrity bios and fad diet books are ignored.
• 2085 The millionth sequence is added (this is assuming it takes 9 years to add another hundred thousand sequences).

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My take:

The 2012 prediction seems almost inevitable -- although it might run far enough ahead to happen by ~November of 2011 depending on lots of things. The others seem less likely.

We might have 10,000 users (readers, not writers) based on N. J. A. Sloane, [1], posting to SeqFan on Dec 16 2010. Even if all current users had an iPhone and downloaded it I'm not sure that would be enough to have that popularity. And that market is fast-changing; it's not clear what the app market of that time will look like.

The 2020 prediction seems less likely yet. Alexa ranks the top 500 sites in Math [2] but the last one is ranked 20 times higher than oeis.org, making us roughly 10,000-th place. Moving from there to second place seems a stretch. (Also, MathWorld would have to move up five places; I would sooner predict a fall than an increase given competition from wikipedia and mathoverflow.)

Charles R Greathouse IV 14:14, 1 February 2011 (UTC)