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Herbert Wilf, Thomas A. Scott Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, will speak on “Another Class of Sums that Your Computer Can Do in Closed Form” 4 p.m. Wednesday in Pardee Hall room 101.
The talk is sponsored by the National Science Foundation’s Research Experience for Undergraduates program at Lafayette this summer.
“This talk will show how a class of sums in which the summand comes from a recurrence relation with constant coefficients can all be done in closed form by a simplealgorithm,” says Gary Gordon, professor of mathematics. “This includes virtually all Fibonacci sums, for instance.”
“Herb promises the talk will be elementary, but will conclude with an unsolved problem,” he adds.
A member of the faculty at Penn since 1962, Wilf is author of several books and more than 100 research and expository papers. He has been editor-in-chief of American Mathematical Monthly and co-founded Journal of Algorithms and Electronic Journal of Combinatorics. He is a Lindback Award winner at Penn, and in 1996 he received the Haimo Award of the Mathematical Association of America for Distinguished Teaching of College or University Mathematics. In March, he received the Euler Medal of the Institute for Combinatorics and its Applications.