[seqfan] Re: Announcement: 2015 John Riordan Prize awarded to Max. A. Alekseyev

[Max Alekseyev]

Dear All,

I'm truly honored to receive this prize named after the great mathematician
John Riordan. In fact, his "Combinatorial Identities" is one of my favorite
books on combinatorics. As you know, I'm also very passionate about
contributing to the OEIS, although recently the academic and family duties
do not permit me to be as active in this respect as I was some years ago.
So this prize bears a personal connotation for me.
On the other hand, I feel somewhat sorry for "stealing" the prize from
other nominees, whose results--I'm sure--are of no less value for the OEIS
and the mathematics in general. So I encourage everybody to reflect these
results in the corresponding sequences and/or publish them as appropriate.

I personally thank Neil, the OEIS Foundation, and the Prize Committee for
starting this prize initiative, bringing additional publicity for the OEIS
and possibly attracting attention of researchers from outside the OEIS
community. I hope the Riordan Prize will be awarded on a regular basis in
future.

P.S. I've uploaded my laureate paper to arxiv.org, where it will be
publicly available early next week.

Regards,
Max


On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 9:17 PM, Neil Sloane <njasloane at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Sequence Fans:
>
> The 2015 John Riordan Prize Committee reached its decision today -- the
> prize will be awarded to Max. A. Alekseyev of George Washington University.
>
> The following announcement has been added to the OEIS Wiki page
> describing the Riordan Prize: https://oeis.org/wiki/RiordanPrize.
>
> Neil Sloane, President, The OEIS Foundation, Inc.
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> Announcement: 2015 John Riordan Prize awarded to Max. A. Alekseyev
>
> January 20 2016. Max. A. Alekseyev of George Washington University will
> receive the 2015 John Riordan Prize from the OEIS Foundation for the
> results in his paper "On Enumeration of Paths in Catalan-Schroeder
> Lattices" (to appear on the arXiv). The John Riordan Prize comes with a
> $1000 prize from the OEIS Foundation.
>
> The classical Catalan and Large Schroeder numbers respectively count
> below-diagonal paths from (0,0) to (n,n) in two classes of directed graphs.
> In his paper, Alekseyev counts paths in a graph which looks like the
> Catalan graph below the diagonal and the Schroeder graph above the
> diagonal. From this he is able to find generating functions for 22
> sequences (A026769-A026779, A026780-A026790) which had been in the On-Line
> Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (the OEIS, https://oeis.org) for sixteen
> years without any formula being discovered.
>
> The 2015 John Riordan Prize was offered for the best solution in 2015 to an
> open problem in the OEIS. Twenty-three nominations were received, and the
> decision was not an easy one. The deciding factor in awarding the prize to
> Max. Alekseyev was the unexpected nature of his result (this was much more
> than finding a proof for an already-conjectured formula), the number of
> sequences to which it could be applied, and the number of years they had
> been in the OEIS.
>
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