Herbert Wilf

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Herbert Saul Wilf

Born	June 13, 1931 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Died	January 7, 2012(2012-01-07) (aged 80) Wynnewood, Pennsylvania
Nationality	American
Fields	Mathematician
Institutions	University of Pennsylvania
Alma mater	Columbia University MIT
Doctoral advisor	Herbert Ellis Robbins
Doctoral students	Fan Chung Richard Garfield Rodica Simion Michael Wertheimer
Known for	Combinatorics
Notable awards	Leroy P. Steele Prize (1998)

Herbert Saul Wilf (June 13, 1931 – January 7, 2012) was 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 wrote 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.

Biography

Wilf was the author of numerous papers and books, and was 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.

Wilf died of a progressive neuromuscular disease in 2012.^[1]

Selected publications

The Number of Independent Sets in a Grid Graph
NJ Calkin, HS Wilf – SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics, 1998
An inequality for the chromatic number of a graph
G Szekeres, HS Wilf – Journal of Combinatorial Theory, 1968

Books

Lecture notes

East Side, West Side
Lectures on Integer Partitions
Lecture Notes on Numerical Analysis (with Dennis Deturck)

Awards

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.

References

↑ "In Memoriam: Herbert S. Wilf". Math.upenn.edu. 1931-06-13. Retrieved 2012-01-14.
↑ Hayman, W. K. (1991). "Review: Generatingfunctionology, by H. S. Wilf". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.) 25 (1): 104–106.

External links

Authority control	WorldCat VIAF: 29571084 LCCN: n50017305 ISNI: 0000 0000 8108 2562 GND: 172451906 SUDOC: 029963842 BNF: cb121478110 MGP: 15200

Persondata
Name	Wilf, Herbert
Alternative names
Short description	American mathematician
Date of birth	June 13, 1931
Place of birth	Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Date of death	January 7, 2012
Place of death	Wynnewood, Pennsylvania

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