Monday, May 23, 2011

My Talk for the Wilf Conference

Laurier (the other university in Waterloo, Ontario) is hosting a conference this May 26-29 in honor of Herb Wilf's 80th birthday. Wilf (b. June 13 1931) is a very influential mathematician, known for his work on combinatorics and combinatorial algorithms. He also founded the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics.

Of course, it's better in person, but if you can't make my talk at 10:40 AM on May 27 2011 in Room N 1001, Faculty of Science Building, WLU, then you can see the slides here.

1 comment:

Sam Alexander said...

Cool slides, the theorem on p.3 is... astonishing. I also like the idea of "holes" on p.16.

Back when I was in the Air Force, I didn't have access to an academic library, and a large proportion of the math books I could find to self-teach were through a website of free math texts linked from Mr. Wilf's website (don't ask me how I ended up on Mr. Wilf's website to begin with, I've long since forgotten). One of those free texts was in the subject I would later end up studying. So, without ever having met me, Mr. Wilf has had a large influence on me...

Also, I'm kicking myself that I didn't have the presence of mind to quote "generatingfunctionology" during my general exam oral. One of my examiners complained that I'd used the word "functionhood" in a written solution. You can see why generatingfunctionology would be topical.