Looking for Patterns in Sequences or Collections?

Need to find patterns in sequences or collections?   Used  this long ago, and was reminded about it in a recent piece in Quanta Magazine.   Remarkably simple and often useful idea.  Also something you can demonstrate to kids that have a fascination with numbers, patterns and matching.

" .... Neil Sloane is considered by some to be one of the most influential mathematicians of our time.  That’s not because of any particular theorem the 75-year-old Welsh native has proved, though over the course of a more than 40-year research career at Bell Labs (later AT&T Labs) he won numerous awards for papers in the fields of combinatorics, coding theory, optics and statistics. Rather, it’s because of the creation for which he’s most famous: the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS), often simply called “Sloane” by its users.   ... " .  

The 50 year old project contains over a quarter million different number and text sequences and pattern descriptions.  These can be searched and matched to any set of numbers or texts.  Used his earlier books, makes sense to have it online.  You can even find close matches to sequences or collections. Lots of interesting related info in the non-technical article.   Read the hints section at the OEIS link to understand how to use it in a number of useful ways.