Herbert Wilf
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Herbert S. Wilf (born 1931) is a mathematician, specializing in combinatorics. He is the Thomas A. Scott Professor of Mathematics in Combinatorial Analysis and Computing at the University of Pennsylvania.
He is the author of numerous papers and books, and has been adviser and mentor to many students and colleagues. His collaborators include Doron Zeilberger, Donald Knuth, and the late Paul Erdős.[citation needed] One of Wilf's former students is Richard Garfield, the creator of the card game Magic: The Gathering. He also served as a thesis advisor for E. Roy Weintraub in the late 1960s.
Herbert Wilf is well known for writing generatingfunctionology.
His other books include:
- A=B (with Doron Zeilberger and Marko Petkovšek)
- Algorithms and Complexity
- East Side, West Side
- Lectures on Integer Partitions
- Lecture Notes on Numerical Analysis (with Dennis Deturck)
- Mathematics for the Physical Sciences
In 1998, Wilf and Zeilberger received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research for their joint paper, "Rational functions certify combinatorial identities" (Journal of the American Mathematical Society, 3 (1990) 147–158). The prize citation reads: "New mathematical ideas can have an impact on experts in a field, on people outside the field, and on how the field develops after the idea has been introduced. The remarkably simple idea of the work of Wilf and Zeilberger has already changed a part of mathematics for the experts, for the high-level users outside the area, and the area itself." Their work has been translated into computer packages that have greatly simplified hypergeometric summation. In 2002, Wilf was awarded Euler Medal by the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications.
