# 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 numbers, 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 interpretations 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 $(f_{0},\dots,f_{d-1})$ 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 10 with Andrew Odlyzko, giving Stanley an Erdős number (http://planetmath.org/ErdHosNumber) of 2.

Title Richard Stanley RichardStanley 2013-03-22 17:01:02 2013-03-22 17:01:02 PrimeFan (13766) PrimeFan (13766) 7 PrimeFan (13766) Biography msc 01A60 msc 01A61 msc 01A65 Richard Peter Stanley