Herbert Wilf

Herbert Saul Wilf
File:Herbert Wilf.jpg
Born	June 13, 1931 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Died	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 E. Roy Weintraub Michael Wertheimer
Known for	Combinatorics
Notable awards	Leroy P. Steele Prize (1998) Euler Medal (2002)

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.

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

• A=B (with Doron Zeilberger and Marko Petkovšek)
• Algorithms and Complexity
• generatingfunctionology.
• Mathematics for the Physical Sciences

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.

See also

• Line graph
• Calkin–Wilf tree
• Szekeres–Wilf number
• Wilf–Zeilberger pair

External links

• Herbert Wilf's homepage
• Wilf's obituary at the University of Pennsylvania
• .
• Herbert Wilf at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics