Neil James Alexander Sloane FLSW is a British-American mathematician. His major contributions are in the fields of combinatorics, error-correcting codes, and sphere packing. Sloane is best known for being the creator and maintainer of the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS).

In geometry, a sphere packing is an arrangement of non-overlapping spheres within a containing space. The spheres considered are usually all of identical size, and the space is usually three-dimensional Euclidean space. However, sphere packing problems can be generalised to consider unequal spheres, spaces of other dimensions or to non-Euclidean spaces such as hyperbolic space.