Combinatorics And Graph Theory

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.

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.

This book evolved from several courses in combinatorics and graph theory given at Appalachian State University and UCLA. Chapter 1 focuses on finite graph theory, including trees, planarity, coloring, matchings, and Ramsey theory. Chapter 2 studies combinatorics, including the principle of inclusion and exclusion, generating functions, recurrence relations, Pólya theory, the stable marriage problem, and several important classes of numbers. Chapter 3 presents infinite pigeonhole principles, König's lemma, and Ramsey's theorem, and discusses their connections to axiomatic set theory. The text is written in an enthusiastic and lively style. It includes results and problems that cross subdisciplines, emphasizing relationships between different areas of mathematics. In addition, recent results appear in the text, illustrating the fact that mathematics is a living discipline. The text is primarily directed toward upper-division undergraduate students, but lower-division undergraduates with a penchant for proof and graduate students seeking an introduction to these subjects will also find much of interest.

Combinatorics and graph theory have mushroomed in recent years. Many overlapping or equivalent results have been produced. Some of these are special cases of unformulated or unrecognized general theorems. The body of knowledge has now reached a stage where approaches toward unification are overdue. To paraphrase Professor Gian-Carlo Rota (Toronto, 1967), "Combinatorics needs fewer theorems and more theory. " In this book we are doing two things at the same time: A. We are presenting a unified treatment of much of combinatorics and graph theory. We have constructed a concise algebraically based, but otherwise self-contained theory, which at one time embraces the basic theorems that one normally wishes to prove while giving a common terminology and framework for the develop ment of further more specialized results. B. We are writing a textbook whereby a student of mathematics or a mathematician with another specialty can learn combinatorics and graph theory. We want this learning to be done in a much more unified way than has generally been possible from the existing literature. Our most difficult problem in the course of writing this book has been to keep A and B in balance. On the one hand, this book would be useless as a textbook if certain intuitively appealing, classical combinatorial results were either overlooked or were treated only at a level of abstraction rendering them beyond all recognition.

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.

Advanced Graph Theory focuses on some of the main notions arising in graph theory with an emphasis from the very start of the book on the possible applications of the theory and the fruitful links existing with linear algebra. The second part of the book covers basic material related to linear recurrence relations with application to counting and the asymptotic estimate of the rate of growth of a sequence satisfying a recurrence relation.

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.

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.