edgepedia

Enumerative and algebraic combinatorialists

21 articles

Arthur T. Benjamin

Arthur T. Benjamin is an American mathematician at Harvey Mudd College who works in combinatorics and performs rapid mental calculation onstage under the name Mathemagics, squaring large numbers faster than calculators.

Bernardo Recamán Santos

Bernardo Recamán Santos, born in Bogotá in 1954, is a Colombian mathematician trained at the University of Warwick whose name is attached to Recamán's sequence.

Bill Gosper

Bill Gosper, born Ralph William Gosper, Jr., is a programmer and mathematician who found the first glider gun in Conway's Game of Life and created Hashlife.

Carl Kostka

Carl Kostka, also Karl Kostka (1846–1921), was a German mathematician and gymnasium professor in Insterburg, East Prussia, known for the Kostka numbers counting semistandard Young tableaux.

Dan Romik

Dan Romik is a mathematician and professor at the University of California, Davis, known for work on longest increasing subsequences, random tilings, and his 2015 Cambridge book on the topic.

David Singmaster

David Singmaster (1938–2023) was an American mathematician who popularized the Rubik's Cube in the West, devised its standard notation, and wrote the first book on the puzzle.

Doron Zeilberger

Doron Zeilberger, born 1950 in Haifa, Israel, is an Israeli mathematician and Board of Governors Professor at Rutgers University who pioneered computer-aided proof in combinatorics through WZ theory and Zeilberger's algorithm.

Federico Ardila

Federico Ardila, also known as Federico Ardila-Mantilla, is a mathematician working at the intersection of combinatorics, algebra, and geometry, known for bringing geometric and Hodge-theoretic tools into matroid theory.

Glen Baxter (mathematician)

Glen Baxter (died 1983) was a mathematician in probability and combinatorics whose operator identity underlies fluctuation theory and gave the Rota–Baxter algebra and Baxter permutations.

Henri Delannoy

Henri-Auguste Delannoy (1833–1915) was a French army officer, trained at the École Polytechnique, who became an amateur mathematician and is remembered for the Delannoy numbers.

Henry W. Gould

Henry W. Gould (Henry Wadsworth Gould), born 1928 in Portsmouth, Virginia, is an American mathematician at West Virginia University known for combinatorial identities and Fibonacci numbers.

Herbert Wilf

Herbert Wilf (1931–2012) was an American mathematician at the University of Pennsylvania known for Wilf–Zeilberger computer-generated proofs, the book generatingfunctionology, and the Stanley–Wilf conjecture on pattern-avoiding permutations.

J. Howard Redfield

J. Howard Redfield (1879–1944) was an American engineer whose single 1927 paper established the Pólya–Redfield enumeration theorem, anticipating results usually credited to George Pólya by a decade.

Marcel-Paul Schützenberger

Marcel-Paul Schützenberger (1920–1996) was a French mathematician, professor at the Sorbonne and member of the Academy of Sciences, known for formal language theory, combinatorics on words, and his late-life mathematical critique of Darwinian evolution.

Marko Petkovšek

Marko Petkovšek (1955–2023) was a Slovenian mathematician and computer scientist at the University of Ljubljana, known for Petkovšek's algorithm for hypergeometric recurrences and the book A=B with Wilf and Zeilberger.

Martin Aigner

Martin Aigner (1942–2023) was an Austrian mathematician in combinatorics and graph theory who co-authored Proofs from THE BOOK with Günter M. Ziegler and taught at Freie Universität Berlin from 1973 to 2010.

Mary Celine Fasenmyer

Mary Celine Fasenmyer was an American mathematician and Sister of Mercy whose 1946 University of Michigan dissertation introduced Sister Celine's method, a mechanical procedure underlying computerized proofs of hypergeometric identities.

Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn

Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn (1918–2012) was a Dutch mathematician at Eindhoven known for de Bruijn sequences, the de Bruijn–Newman constant, de Bruijn indices, and the Automath proof-checking language.

Percy Alexander MacMahon

Percy Alexander MacMahon (1854–1929) was a British mathematician and retired Royal Artillery officer, the leading British combinatorialist of his era, known for the Master Theorem, plane partitions, and Combinatory Analysis.

Simon Plouffe

Simon Plouffe is a Canadian mathematician, born in Saint-Jovite, Quebec, who co-discovered the BBP formula for pi in 1995 and co-authored The Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences with Neil Sloane.

Zvezdelina Stankova

Zvezdelina Entcheva Stankova (Звезделина Станкова) is a Bulgarian-American combinatorialist at UC Berkeley, a two-time IMO silver medalist for Bulgaria who founded the Berkeley Math Circle and Bay Area Mathematical Olympiad.