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

combinatorics Combinatorics is an area of mathematics primarily concerned with counting, both as a means and as an end to obtaining results, and certain properties of finite structures. It is closely related to many other areas of mathematics and has many ...

and

graph theory In mathematics and computer science, graph theory is the study of ''graph (discrete mathematics), graphs'', which are mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of ''Vertex (graph ...

. He was the Thomas A. Scott Professor of Mathematics in Combinatorial Analysis and Computing at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...

. 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 Donald Ervin Knuth ( ; born January 10, 1938) is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of comp ...

. One of Wilf's former students is

Richard Garfield Richard Channing Garfield (born June 26, 1963) is an American mathematician, inventor, and game designer. Garfield created '' Magic: The Gathering'', which is considered to be the first collectible card game (CCG). ''Magic'' debuted in 1993, and ...

, the creator of the

collectible card game A collectible card game (CCG), also called a trading card game (TCG) among other names, is a type of card game that mixes strategy game, strategic deck building elements with features of trading cards. The genre was introduced with ''Magic: The G ...

'' 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 A neuromuscular disease is any disease affecting the peripheral nervous system (PNS), the neuromuscular junctions, or skeletal muscles, all of which are components of the motor unit. Damage to any of these structures can cause muscle atrophy and we ...

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 The ''Journal of the American Mathematical Society'' (''JAMS''), is a quarterly peer-reviewed mathematical journal published by the American Mathematical Society. It was established in January 1988. Abstracting and indexing This journal is abs ...

'', 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 mathematics, the Gaussian or ordinary hypergeometric function 2''F''1(''a'',''b'';''c'';''z'') is a Special functions, special function represented by the hypergeometric series, that includes many other special functions as special case, spe ...

. In 2002, Wilf was awarded the Euler Medal by the

Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications The Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications (ICA) is an international scientific organization formed in 1990 to increase the visibility and influence of the Combinatorics, combinatorial community. In pursuit of this goal, the ICA sponsors ...

Selected publications

* * * * * 1971: (editor with

Frank Harary Frank Harary (March 11, 1921 – January 4, 2005) was an American mathematician, who specialized in graph theory. He was widely recognized as one of the "fathers" of modern graph theory. Harary was a master of clear exposition and, together with ...

) ''Mathematical Aspects of Electrical Networks Analysis'', SIAM-AMS Proceedings, Volume 3,

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

* 1998: (with N. J. Calkin) "The Number of Independent Sets in a Grid Graph", ''

SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics '' SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics'' is a peer-reviewed mathematics journal published quarterly by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The journal includes articles on pure and applied discrete mathematics. It was es ...

Books

''A=B''
(with Doron Zeilberger and

Marko Petkovšek Marko Petkovšek (1955 – 24 March 2023) was a Slovenian mathematician working mainly in symbolic computation. He was a professor of discrete and computational mathematics at the University of Ljubljana. He is best known for Petkovšek's algorit ...

)
''Algorithms and Complexity''

* ''Combinatorial Algorithms'', with Albert Nijenhuis

Lecture notes

''East Side, West Side''

''Lectures on Integer Partitions''

''Lecture Notes on Numerical Analysis''
(with Dennis Deturck)

References

External links

Herbert Wilf's homepage

* *
The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wilf, Herbert 1931 births 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Combinatorialists University of Pennsylvania faculty Mathematicians at the University of Pennsylvania 2012 deaths The American Mathematical Monthly editors American textbook writers Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni