Herbert Wilf

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

Awards In 1996, Wilf received the Deborah and Franklin Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics.

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 simplified hypergeometric summation.

In 2002, Wilf was awarded the Euler Medal by the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications.

Selected publications

1971: (editor with Frank Harary) Mathematical Aspects of Electrical Networks Analysis, SIAM-AMS Proceedings, Volume 3,American Mathematical Society 1998: (with N. J. Calkin) "The Number of Independent Sets in a Grid Graph", SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics

Books A=B (with Doron Zeilberger and Marko Petkovšek) Algorithms and Complexity generatingfunctionology. Mathematics for the Physical Sciences Combinatorial Algorithms, with Albert Nijenhuis

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