Herbert Wilf
Herbert Saul Wilf (born June 13, 1931 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , † January 7, 2012 in Wynnewood , Pennsylvania) was an American mathematician who dealt with combinatorics .
Life
Wilf, born in Philadelphia in 1931, received his doctorate in 1958 from Columbia University with Herbert Robbins ( Transitions of neutrons in multilayered slab geometry ), as he himself writes, but in reality with the physicist Gerald Goertzel (1919-2002), for whom he is from In 1952, alongside his studies, worked in a kind of think tank for the construction of early civil nuclear reactors. After receiving his doctorate, he was at the University of Illinois . He was a Thomas A. Scott Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania . He worked with Donald Knuth and Doron Zeilberger (on hypergeometric identities, Wilf-Zeilberger pairs) , among others , and was the author of several well-known textbooks such as Generatingfunctionology on generating functions.
Wilf was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1973/74 and received the Leroy P. Steele Prize with Doron Zeilberger in 1998 (for work with Zeilberger on Rational functions certify combinatorial identities , Journal of the AMS, Vol. 3, 1990, p. 147). In 2002 he received the Euler Medal from the Institute for Combinatorics in Winnipeg . In 1962 he gave a lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm ( A generalization of the inequality of arithmetic and geometric means and applications ).
Fonts
- Mathematics for the physical sciences. Wiley, 1962, Dover 1978
- A global bisection algorithm for computing the zeros of polynomials in the complex plane. Journal ACM 25 (1978), pp. 415-420 (PDF; 353 kB)
- with Albert Nijenhuis : Combinatorial Algorithms. Academic Press 1978
- Generating functionology. Academic Press 1990, 1994
- Mark Petkovsek, Doron Zeilberger: . AK Peters 1996
Web links
- Wilf's homepage, many of his books and articles are online
- A. Tefera: What is a Wilf-Zeilberger Pair? Notices AMS, April 2010 (PDF; 66 kB)
- Fan Chung, Curtis Greene, Joan Hutchinson (Eds.): Herbert S. Wilf (1931-2012) , Notices AMS, 2015, No. 4, online
Individual evidence
- ^ Obituary of the University of Pennsylvania ( Memento from January 20, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ The ICA Medals. Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications, accessed June 17, 2018 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Wilf, Herbert |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Wilf, Herbert Saul (full name) |
| BRIEF 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) , Pennsylvania |