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 tocombinatorics. The book is infamous for its exercise which presents66 objects counted by the Catalan numbers, then challenges the readerto give a bijective proof of that fact. On his website, he maintainsthe “Catalan addendum”, which as of 26 February 2007 includes 147different combinatorial interpretations
for the Catalan numbers.
Stanley was awarded the Schock prize in 2003 for his contributions tocombinatorics, in particular his proof of the necessity of McMullen’sconditions for a tuple to be the f-vector of asimplicial polytope (one half of the g-theorem), and for his advancementof graduate-level mathematical exposition.
In 1978, Stanley co-authored a paper on the “Enumeration of powersums modulo a prime” in J. Number Theory 10 with AndrewOdlyzko, giving Stanley an Erdős number (http://planetmath.org/ErdHosNumber)of 2.