Visiting Scholar Pierre Nicodeme Lectures on Analytic Combinatorics

Le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) Research Associate Dr. Pierre Nicodeme from the Ecole Polytechnique delivered a lecture on November 25, 2013 sponsored by the Birzeit University Mathematics Department.
The lecture presented the content of courses that will be offered in Nablus this summer. He then gave two introductory presentations on analytic combinatorics.
Nicodeme presented the paradox of waiting time of words in random texts. He said the problem is solved very elegantly by languages decomposition and use of the autocorrelation structure of the words, notions which were formalized in 1984 by Guibas and Odlyzko.
He also discussed enumeration of the number of permutations called derangements; these permutations have no fixed points. The Analytic Combinatorics approach solves the problem by use of exponential generating functions, a construction called labeled product and the Set and Cycle constructors. This approach extends to more difficult problems (permutations with only cycles of even length, etc.) Two examples of computer algebra for generating functions were also addressed.
Pierre Nicodeme was born in 1948 and graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique in 1969. He spent about 20 years in the computer industry as an engineer and then moved to research in 1990. Nicodeme got his PhD in 1997 and joined, as a post doctorate, a multidisciplinary team at the German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany. Nicodeme worked at the CNRS as a researcher until retirement in 2013. Presently, Nicodeme is an honorary CNRS researcher and associate researcher at the Computer Science Lab- Université Paris13.