Contributor to the fields of combinatorics, error-correction coding, and sphere packing, Sloane's research has ranged far and wide, including coding theory, sphere packing, lattices and quadratic forms, packing lines, and planes, spherical codes and designs, quantizing, geometry, combinatorics, the design of experiments, integer sequences, group theory, graph theory, spectroscopy, crystallography, and cryptography. A complete list of his books and articles is available online, and many may be downloaded in PostScript or PDF format. Other information includes some pictures of packings and the like, in PostScript form, and various tables: codes, orthogonal arrays, etc.
He studied at Cornell University under Nick DeClaris, Frank Rosenblatt, Frederick Jelinek, and Wolfgang Heinrich Johannes Fuchs, receiving his Ph.D. in 1967. His doctoral dissertation was titled Lengths of cycle times in random neural networks. Sloane joined AT&T Bell Labs in 1968 and became an AT&T Fellow in 1998. He has also been an IEEE Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.