Professor emeritus Henry W. Gould will be honored during a lecture hosted by the West Virginia University Department of Mathematics from 4-5 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 20, in Room 315, Armstrong Hall, on the Downtown Campus.

George Andrews�€the Evan Pugh Professor in the Department of Mathematics at The Pennsylvania State University�€will presentGoulds Function and Problems in Partitions,as part of the WVU Distinguished Lecture Series in Mathematics in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences.

Considered the worlds leading expert in the theory of integer partitions, Andrews is a mathematician working in analysis and combinatorics who has contributed to over 250 research articles on q-series, special functions, combinatorics and applications.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and author ofThe Theory of Partitions,which considers the many theoretical aspects of integer partitions for students and researchers.

Additionally, he discovered theLost Notebookof Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan in 1974, and he is currently the voice of the calculus reform movement interested in mathematical pedagogy.

The information in the lecture is technical, but the concepts discussed are entirely elementary notions of how the counting numbers may be represented by sums of smaller numbers,said Sherm Riemenschneider, professor and chair of the WVU Department of Mathematics.What will come out will no doubt be a wealth of interesting observations about numbers.

Gould, a well-known researcher of combinatorics, number theory and special functions, received his masters from the University of Virginia in 1956 before he joined the WVU faculty in 1958.

He also studied communications theory at the National Radio Institute in Washington, D.C. Those studies led him to work as a broadcast radio announcer and engineer, where he worked out proofs while listening to classical music.

After retiring in spring of 2007 with 49 years of scholarship, Gould remains very active at WVU by hosting and creatively working with the Eiesland Visiting Scholar, Jocelyn Quaintance. Over the years, Gould has studied combinatorial analysis, number theory, special functions of mathematical physics and the history of mathematics and astronomy.

Moreover, he is a world renowned expert in combinatorial identities and one of three AAAS Fellows at WVU , of which there are only eight in the state.

Gould has published over 180 papers appearing in over 20 countries, and he is the author of the widely used, major reference book,Combinatorial Identities,which has received many research awards. He is a member of numerous honorary organizations.