Richard Stanley


Richard Peter Stanley (1944 - ) is an American mathematician. He is a student of Gian-Carlo Rota.

A Harvard graduate, Stanley went on to teach at MIT. His book Enumerative Combinatorics is seen as a landmark introduction to combinatorics. The book is infamous for its exercise which presents 66 objects counted by the Catalan numbersMathworldPlanetmath, then challenges the reader to give a bijective proof of that fact. On his website, he maintains the “Catalan addendum”, which as of 26 February 2007 includes 147 different combinatorial interpretationsMathworldPlanetmathPlanetmath for the Catalan numbers.

Stanley was awarded the Schock prize in 2003 for his contributions to combinatorics, in particular his proof of the necessity of McMullen’s conditions for a tuple (f0,,fd-1) to be the f-vector of a simplicial polytope (one half of the g-theorem), and for his advancement of graduate-level mathematical exposition.

In 1978, Stanley co-authored a paper on the “Enumeration of power sums modulo a prime” in J. Number TheoryMathworldPlanetmath 10 with Andrew Odlyzko, giving Stanley an Erdős number (http://planetmath.org/ErdHosNumber) of 2.

Title Richard Stanley
Canonical name RichardStanley
Date of creation 2013-03-22 17:01:02
Last modified on 2013-03-22 17:01:02
Owner PrimeFan (13766)
Last modified by PrimeFan (13766)
Numerical id 7
Author PrimeFan (13766)
Entry type Biography
Classification msc 01A60
Classification msc 01A61
Classification msc 01A65
Synonym Richard Peter Stanley