Herbert Wilf

Herbert Saul Wilf ( born June 13, 1931 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, † January 7, 2012 in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania) was an American mathematician who worked on combinatorics.

Life

Wilf was born in 1931 in Philadelphia, in 1958 received his doctorate at Columbia University with Herbert Robbins ( Transitions of neutrons in multilayered slab geometry ), as he himself writes, but in reality when the physicist Gerald Goertzel ( 1919-2002 ), for which he from 1952 while studying in a kind of think tank working for the design of early civilian nuclear reactors. After his doctorate, he was at the University of Illinois. He was Thomas A. Scott Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. He has worked with Donald Knuth and Doron Zeilberger (via hypergeometric identities, Wilf - Zeilberger pairs) and was the author of several well-known textbooks as Generatingfunctionology on generating functions.

Wilf was in 1973/74 Guggenheim Fellow and was awarded in 1998 with the Leroy P. Steele Doron Zeilberger Prize ( for work with Rational functions certify combinatorial Zeilberger to identities, Journal of the AMS, Vol 3, 1990, p 147). In 2002 he was awarded the Euler Medal of the Institute of Combinatorics in Winnipeg. In 1962 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm (A generalization of the inequality of arithmetic and geometric Means and applications ).

Writings

• Mathematics for the physical sciences. Wiley, 1962, Dover 1978
• Albert Nijenhuis: Combinatorial Algorithms. Academic Press 1978
• Generatingfunctionology. Academic Press 1990, 1994
• With Mark Petkovsek, Doron Zeilberger: . A. K. Peters 1996