Talk:Durfee square

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"Durfee's square is a great invention of the importance of which its author has no conception."

Seriously? Hard to believe this was actually written down. Here's my guess at how this sentence might have come to be. Could it be that Sylvester wanted to say, "Durfee's square is a great invention whose importance its author has no conception of", but he rephrased it following the old prescriptivist rule that says you can't end a sentence with a preposition??? Looks like Sylvester lived a century and a half after the inventor of this prescriptive rule, John Dryden. Also see: History of Linguistic Prescription in English. I'm curious whether this was a rule Sylvester adhered BY.

The Durfee square can be used to prove various identities involving formal power series. See for example Problem 1b of the 2020 comprehensive exam in combinatorial enumeration from the University of Waterloo:

https://uwaterloo.ca/combinatorics-and-optimization/sites/ca.combinatorics-and-optimization/files/uploads/files/enumcomp2020-final.pdf

- Sam Winnick

2607:9880:1A18:10A:15B7:9D9F:7A38:D1DB (talk) 04:17, 18 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]