Diagonal recurrence relations for the Stirling numbers of the first kind

In the paper, the author presents diagonal recurrence relations for the Stirling numbers of the first kind. As by-products, the author also recovers three explicit formulas for special values of the Bell polynomials of the second kind.Comment: 7 page

Why Delannoy numbers?

This article is not a research paper, but a little note on the history of combinatorics: We present here a tentative short biography of Henri Delannoy, and a survey of his most notable works. This answers to the question raised in the title, as these works are related to lattice paths enumeration, to the so-called Delannoy numbers, and were the first general way to solve Ballot-like problems. These numbers appear in probabilistic game theory, alignments of DNA sequences, tiling problems, temporal representation models, analysis of algorithms and combinatorial structures.Comment: Presented to the conference "Lattice Paths Combinatorics and Discrete Distributions" (Athens, June 5-7, 2002) and to appear in the Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference