The plot isn't great, but the plots are pretty good.

December 2, 2010 6:16 AM

The OEIS Movie is simply a slideshow of one thousand plots from the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, at two plots per second with sequence-generated music.

You can download the movie in Quicktime format here.

posted by Wolfdog (12 comments total)

A plot generator, eh?

*swarms of IP traffic from Los Angeles
posted by saturday_morning at 6:38 AM on December 2, 2010

It's the beauty of mathematics meets the amazing bandwidth of vision. If you stare at it intently for the whole eight minutes, you will feel like the guy in the sci-fi movie who is force-fed complete knowledge of the aliens' culture and technology by a bunch of spinning lights.
posted by drdanger at 6:42 AM on December 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

that's seriously awesome.
posted by oonh at 6:45 AM on December 2, 2010

The OEIS provides a 'listen' link for every sequence which will map turn it into a little MIDI sequence with some adjustable parameters. This sequence, for example, can be played here. (Or maybe it can't be. It's not working for me at the moment. But that's what's supposed to happen.)
posted by Wolfdog at 6:50 AM on December 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

Really interesting, but I wish they had put the name of the sequence along with its A... code number. For instance, there's a striking one 27 seconds in that caught my eye, A004186, which turns out to simply be "Arrange digits of n in decreasing order."
posted by Electric Dragon at 7:54 AM on December 2, 2010

Why is the Fibonacci sequence repeating? http://oeis.org/play?seq=A000045
posted by ennui.bz at 8:20 AM on December 2, 2010

Because it's periodic mod 12.
posted by Wolfdog at 8:20 AM on December 2, 2010

Also, if you wait until the end of the Binary palindromic numbers, the tune really changes
posted by ennui.bz at 8:38 AM on December 2, 2010

(or mod 88, as may be more relevant)
posted by Wolfdog at 9:17 AM on December 2, 2010

Really interesting, but I wish they had put the name of the sequence along with its A... code number

The frame-by-frame has that info. For instance, frame 900 is the "Base 3 reversal of n (written in base 10)" (what'll those mathematicians think of next?).
posted by kenko at 10:10 AM on December 2, 2010

Any idea how these sequences were chosen? Some of the pictures are very interesting and some are, well, not.
posted by madcaptenor at 12:01 PM on December 2, 2010

So, I looked at the actual OEIS page for this one, and... Can anyone explain to me just WTF is going on here?
posted by cthuljew at 11:59 PM on December 2, 2010