This award supports the research in combinatorics of Professors Dennis Stanton, Paul Edelman, and Dennis White of the University of Minnesota. Their project is to study partition statistics and orthogonal polynomials, the weak order of the symmetric group, and partition congruences. This research falls in the broad category of combinatorics, which is one of the most active fields in today's mathematics. Fundamentally, combinatorics represents a systematization of the very first of all mathematical activities, counting. In its modern development, however, combinatorics has gone beyond just counting to make use of a wide variety of advanced mathematical techniques, and although its roots go back several centuries, the field has had an explosive development in the past few decades because of its importance in communications and information technology.
