Where’s Derb? Right here, Jonah.

If you’d like to see the next few terms in that sequence starting 1, 2, 42,…, just go here. The second comment references the Riemann Hypothesis.

WARNING: That website, the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, is addictive.

MATH JOKE: Mathematicians distinguish carefully between a sequence (infinitely long list of numbers) and a series (what you get, if anything, by adding all those numbers together). Here’s the joke, which I’ve taken from Dan Sonnenschein’s clever little compendium Mathematical Musings, apparently available only through the AMS… which is a shame, because it includes a quote from ME. This is not that quote, this is the joke.

“Once when walking past a lounge… filled with a large crowd watching TV, [Polish mathematician Antoni Zygmund] asked one of his students what was going on. The student told him that the crowd was watching the World Series and explained to him some of the features of this baseball phenomenon. Zygmund thought about it for a few minutes and commented: ‘I think it should be called the World Sequence.’”