Dominique Foata

Dominique Foata (born in Damascus, Syria, during the French mandate on October 12, 1934) is a mathematician who works in enumerative combinatorics. With Pierre Cartier and Marcel-Paul Schützenberger he pioneered the modern approach to classical combinatorics, that lead, in part, to the current blossoming of algebraic combinatorics. His pioneering work on permutation statistics, and his combinatorial approach to special functions, are especially notable.

Foata gave an invited talk at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Warsaw (1983). Among his honors are the Scientific Prize of the Union des Assurances de Paris (September 1985). With Adalbert Kerber and Volker Strehl he founded the Seminaire Lotharingien de combinatoire.

External links

• Dominique Foata at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Foata's website
• the Foata festschrift at the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, 1996