Herbert Wilf

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.

Biography

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 The Gathering. He also served as a thesis advisor for E. Roy Weintraub in the late 1960s.

Selected publications

• The Number of Independent Sets in a Grid Graph<br/>NJ Calkin, HS Wilf - SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics, 1998
• An inequality for the chromatic number of a graph<br/>G Szekeres, HS Wilf - J. Combinatorial Theory, 1968

Books

• (with Doron Zeilberger and Marko Petkovšek)
• .

Lecture notes

• (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...
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