| Herbert Saul Wilf | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Mathematician |
| Institutions | University of Pennsylvania |
| Alma mater | Columbia University MIT |
| Doctoral advisor | Herbert Ellis Robbins |
| Doctoral students | Fan Chung Richard Garfield Michael Wertheimer |
| Known for | Combinatorics |
| Notable awards | Leroy P. Steele Prize (1998) |
Herbert Saul Wilf (born 1931) is a mathematician, specializing in combinatorics and graph theory. He was the Thomas A. Scott Professor of Mathematics in Combinatorial Analysis and Computing at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written numerous books and research papers. Together with Neil Calkin he founded The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics in 1994 and was its editor-in-chief until 2001.
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H. S. Wilf is the author of numerous papers and books, and has been adviser and mentor to many students and colleagues. His collaborators include Doron Zeilberger and Donald Knuth. One of Wilf's former students is Richard Garfield, the creator of the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering. He also served as a thesis advisor for E. Roy Weintraub in the late 1960s.
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 the Euler Medal by the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications.