Herbert Wilf, American mathematician, died he was 80.

Herbert Saul Wilf was a mathematician, specializing in combinatorics and graph theory died he was 80.. 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.

(June 13, 1931 – January 7, 2012) 

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.^[1]

Selected publications

• The Number of Independent Sets in a Grid Graph
  NJ Calkin, HS Wilf – SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics, 1998
• An inequality for the chromatic number of a graph
  G Szekeres, HS Wilf – J. Combinatorial Theory, 1968

Books

• A=B (with Doron Zeilberger and Marko Petkovšek)
• Algorithms and Complexity
• generatingfunctionology.^[2]
• Mathematics for the Physical Sciences

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