This award supports the research of Professor D. Zeilberger to work in combinatorics and special functions. He intends to work on the Macdonald conjecture, the conjecture of Askey and Gessel on positivity of coefficients of certain rational power series and that of Mills, Robbins, and Rumsey on alternating sign matrices. The research is in the general area of combinatorics. Combinatorics attempts to find efficient methods to study how discrete collections of objects can be organized. And, so it is extremely important to modern communications, for example the design of large networks as in telephone systems and the design of algorithms in computer science.
