Mathematical essays in honor of gian-carlo rota

The Mathematical Essays in this volume pay tribute to Gian-Carlo Rota in honor of his 64th birthday. The breadth and depth of Rota's interests, research, and influence are reflected in such areas as combinatorics, invariant theory, geometry, algebraic topology, representation theory, and umbral calculus, one paper coauthored by Rota himself on the umbral calculus. Other important areas of research that are touched on this outstanding collection include special functions, commutative algebra, and statistics. Contents: Preface/B. Sagan and R.P. Stanley Rotafest Program MacMahon's Partition Analysis: I. The Lecture Hall Partition Theorem/G.E. Andrews The cd-Index of Zonotopes and Arrangements/L.J. Billera, R. Ehrenborg and M. Readdy Letter-Place Methods and Homotopy/D.A. Buchsbaum Classification of Trivectors in 6-D Space/W. Chan Parameter Augmentation for Basic Hypergeometric Series, I/W.Y.C. Chen and Z.-G. Liu Unities and Negation/H. Crapo and C. Le Conte de Poly-Barbut The Would-Be Method of Targeted Rings/O.M. D'Antona Lattice Walks and Primary Decomposition/P. Diaconis, D. Eisenbud and B. Sturmfels Natural Exponential Families and Umbral Calculus/A. Di Bucchianico and D.E. Loeb Umbral Calculus in Hilber Space/A. Di Bucchianico, D.E. Loeb and G.-C. Rota A Strategy for Determing Polynomial Orthogonality/J.M. Freeman Plethystic Formulas and Positivity for q, t -Kostka Coefficients/A.M. Garsia and J. Remmel An Alternative Evaluation of the Andrews-Burge Determinant/C. Krattenthaler The Number of Points in a Combinatorial Geometry with No 8-Point-Line Minors/J.E. Bonin and J.P.S. Kung Umbral Shifts and Symmetric Functions of Schur Type/M.A. Mendez An Axiomization for Cubic Algebras/C. Bailey and J. Oliveira An Elementary Proof of Roichman's Rule for Irreducible Characters of Iwahori-Hecke Algebras of Type A/A. Ram Universal Constructions in Umbral Calculus/N. Ray Hyperplane Arrangements, Parking Functions and Tree Invariants/R.P. Stanley More Orthogonal Polynomials as Moments/M.E.H. Ismail and D. Stanton Difference Equations via the Classical Umbral Calculus/B.D. Taylor An Analogy in Geometric Homology: Rigidity and Cofactors on Geometric Graphs/W. Whiteley The Umbral Calculus and Identities for Hypergeometric Functions with Special Arguments/J. Wimp Apologies to T.S. Eliot: The Rota Nerds/J.S. Yang Series: Progress in Mathematics, Volume 161