[hxhxhrra]

It is hard to overestimate the importance of the OEIS in enumerative combinatorics.

I discovered the main results of my PhD thesis essentially as follows:

1. Find complicated construction A, hoping to prove some new results.

2. Fail to sufficiently understand/analyze A.

3. Write computer program to analyze characteristics of A for small n.

4. Using OEIS, discover that apparently A is (in some sense) equivalent to some completely different construction B, which is much simpler and well-understood.

5. Show desired result as well as further other results using B and variations of it.