Monday, March 26th, 2007
2:30pm - 3:30pm, in Science 2-065

Akalu Tefera

Grand Valley State University and MIT

Computer-generated and Combinatorial Proofs of Certain Identities

Abstract: In early nineties symbolic summation received a dramatic boost with the introduction of the Wilf-Zeilberger (WZ) method. The WZ method finds closed-form expressions for various sums and proves large classes of combinatorial identities using an elegant algorithmic procedure. In this talk we explore and highlight the discrete WZ method and formulate combinatorial identities that give representation of positive integers as linear combination of even powers of 2 with binomial coefficients.