Philippe Flajolet's early work in combinatorics

Abstract

Some of Philippe Flajolet's combinatorial contributions that he wrote between 1976 and 1995, say, are described. In most of Flajolet's papers, asymptotic/analytic considerations play a major role. To be true to the spirit of the journal ECA, the emphasis is on the \emph{combinatorial} part. Covered are Register function of binary trees, approximate counting, digital search trees and the Rice formula, probabilistic counting, adding a new slice, Ramanujan's influence, finite differences and harmonic numbers, Digits and the Mellin-Perron formula.