Covers the most important combinatorial structures and techniques. This is a book of problems and solutions which range in difficulty and scope from the elementary/student-oriented to open questions at the research level. Each problem is accompanied by a complete and detailed solution together with appropriate references to the mathematical literature, helping the reader not only to learn but to apply the relevant discrete methods. The text is unique in its range and variety -- some problems include straightforward manipulations while others are more complicated and require insights and a solid foundation of combinatorics and/or graph theory. Includes a dictionary of terms that makes many of the challenging problems accessible to those whose mathematical education is limited to highschool algebra.

These notes were first used in an introductory course team taught by the authors at Appalachian State University to advanced undergraduates and beginning graduates. The text was written with four pedagogical goals in mind: offer a variety of topics in one course, get to the main themes and tools as efficiently as possible, show the relationships between the different topics, and include recent results to convince students that mathematics is a living discipline.

The aim of this book is to introduce a range of combinatorial methods for those who want to apply these methods in the solution of practical and theoretical problems. Various tricks and techniques are taught by means of exercises. Hints are given in a separate section and a third section contains all solutions in detail. A dictionary section gives definitions of the combinatorial notions occurring in the book.Combinatorial Problems and Exercises was first published in 1979. This revised edition has the same basic structure but has been brought up to date with a series of exercises on random walks on graphs and their relations to eigenvalues, expansion properties and electrical resistance. In various chapters the author found lines of thought that have been extended in a natural and significant way in recent years. About 60 new exercises (more counting sub-problems) have been added and several solutions have been simplified.

Graph Theory, Combinatorics and Algorithms: Interdisciplinary Applications focuses on discrete mathematics and combinatorial algorithms interacting with real world problems in computer science, operations research, applied mathematics and engineering. The book contains eleven chapters written by experts in their respective fields, and covers a wide spectrum of high-interest problems across these discipline domains. Among the contributing authors are Richard Karp of UC Berkeley and Robert Tarjan of Princeton; both are at the pinnacle of research scholarship in Graph Theory and Combinatorics. The chapters from the contributing authors focus on "real world" applications, all of which will be of considerable interest across the areas of Operations Research, Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, and Engineering. These problems include Internet congestion control, high-speed communication networks, multi-object auctions, resource allocation, software testing, data structures, etc. In sum, this is a book focused on major, contemporary problems, written by the top research scholars in the field, using cutting-edge mathematical and computational techniques.

The primary intent of the book is to introduce an array of beautiful problems in a variety of subjects quickly, pithily and completely rigorously to graduate students and advanced undergraduates. The book takes a number of specific problems and solves them, the needed tools developed along the way in the context of the particular problems. It treats a melange of topics from combinatorial probability theory, number theory, random graph theory and combinatorics. The problems in this book involve the asymptotic analysis of a discrete construct, as some natural parameter of the system tends to infinity. Besides bridging discrete mathematics and mathematical analysis, the book makes a modest attempt at bridging disciplines. The problems were selected with an eye toward accessibility to a wide audience, including advanced undergraduate students. The book could be used for a seminar course in which students present the lectures.

This book discusses the origin of graph theory from its humble beginnings in recreational mathematics to its modern setting or modeling communication networks, as is evidenced by the World Wide Web graph used by many Internet search engines. The second edition of the book includes recent developments in the theory of signed adjacency matrices involving the proof of sensitivity conjecture and the theory of Ramanujan graphs. In addition, the book discusses topics such as Pick’s theorem on areas of lattice polygons and Graham–Pollak’s work on addressing of graphs. The concept of graph is fundamental in mathematics and engineering, as it conveniently encodes diverse relations and facilitates combinatorial analysis of many theoretical and practical problems. The text is ideal for a one-semester course at the advanced undergraduate level or beginning graduate level.

In the winter of 1978, Professor George P61ya and I jointly taught Stanford University's introductory combinatorics course. This was a great opportunity for me, as I had known of Professor P61ya since having read his classic book, How to Solve It, as a teenager. Working with P6lya, who ·was over ninety years old at the time, was every bit as rewarding as I had hoped it would be. His creativity, intelligence, warmth and generosity of spirit, and wonderful gift for teaching continue to be an inspiration to me. Combinatorics is one of the branches of mathematics that play a crucial role in computer sCience, since digital computers manipulate discrete, finite objects. Combinatorics impinges on computing in two ways. First, the properties of graphs and other combinatorial objects lead directly to algorithms for solving graph-theoretic problems, which have widespread application in non-numerical as well as in numerical computing. Second, combinatorial methods provide many analytical tools that can be used for determining the worst-case and expected performance of computer algorithms. A knowledge of combinatorics will serve the computer scientist well. Combinatorics can be classified into three types: enumerative, eXistential, and constructive. Enumerative combinatorics deals with the counting of combinatorial objects. Existential combinatorics studies the existence or nonexistence of combinatorial configurations.

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This is a textbook for an introductory combinatorics course lasting one or two semesters. An extensive list of problems, ranging from routine exercises to research questions, is included. In each section, there are also exercises that contain material not explicitly discussed in the preceding text, so as to provide instructors with extra choices if they want to shift the emphasis of their course.Just as with the first two editions, the new edition walks the reader through the classic parts of combinatorial enumeration and graph theory, while also discussing some recent progress in the area: on the one hand, providing material that will help students learn the basic techniques, and on the other hand, showing that some questions at the forefront of research are comprehensible and accessible to the talented and hardworking undergraduate. The basic topics discussed are: the twelvefold way, cycles in permutations, the formula of inclusion and exclusion, the notion of graphs and trees, matchings, Eulerian and Hamiltonian cycles, and planar graphs.The selected advanced topics are: Ramsey theory, pattern avoidance, the probabilistic method, partially ordered sets, the theory of designs (new to this edition), enumeration under group action (new to this edition), generating functions of labeled and unlabeled structures and algorithms and complexity.As the goal of the book is to encourage students to learn more combinatorics, every effort has been made to provide them with a not only useful, but also enjoyable and engaging reading.The Solution Manual is available upon request for all instructors who adopt this book as a course text. Please send your request to [email protected].

This text provides a theoretical background for several topics in combinatorial mathematics, such as enumerative combinatorics (including partitions and Burnside's lemma), magic and Latin squares, graph theory, extremal combinatorics, mathematical games and elementary probability. A number of examples are given with explanations while the book also provides more than 300 exercises of different levels of difficulty that are arranged at the end of each chapter, and more than 130 additional challenging problems, including problems from mathematical olympiads. Solutions or hints to all exercises and problems are included. The book can be used by secondary school students preparing for mathematical competitions, by their instructors, and by undergraduate students. The book may also be useful for graduate students and for researchers that apply combinatorial methods in different areas.