What is the sequence described by the counts of integer Cartesian coordinates (x, y) within circles of successive whole number radii centered at the origin?
It's the Gauss Circle Problem, with values http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/A000328 or http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/A051132 depending on how you handle the boundaries. I don't have an explicit formula for this myself, though the MathWorld article has a few sum representations.