Introduction To Enumerative Combinatorics

Written by one of the leading authors and researchers in the field, this comprehensive modern text offers a strong focus on enumeration, a vitally important area in introductory combinatorics crucial for further study in the field. Miklós Bóna's text fills the gap between introductory textbooks in discrete mathematics and advanced graduate textbooks in enumerative combinatorics, and is one of the very first intermediate-level books to focus on enumerative combinatorics. The text can be used for an advanced undergraduate course by thoroughly covering the chapters in Part I on basic enumeration and by selecting a few special topics, or for an introductory graduate course by concentrating on the main areas of enumeration discussed in Part II. The special topics of Part III make the book suitable for a reading course. This text is part of the Walter Rudin Student Series in Advanced Mathematics.

Introduction to Enumerative and Analytic Combinatorics fills the gap between introductory texts in discrete mathematics and advanced graduate texts in enumerative combinatorics. The book first deals with basic counting principles, compositions and partitions, and generating functions. It then focuses on the structure of permutations, graph enumerat

Richard Stanley's two-volume basic introduction to enumerative combinatorics has become the standard guide to the topic for students and experts alike. This thoroughly revised second edition of Volume 1 includes ten new sections and more than 300 new exercises, most with solutions, reflecting numerous new developments since the publication of the first edition in 1986. The author brings the coverage up to date and includes a wide variety of additional applications and examples, as well as updated and expanded chapter bibliographies. Many of the less difficult new exercises have no solutions so that they can more easily be assigned to students. The material on P-partitions has been rearranged and generalized; the treatment of permutation statistics has been greatly enlarged; and there are also new sections on q-analogues of permutations, hyperplane arrangements, the cd-index, promotion and evacuation and differential posets.

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]. Sample Chapter(s) Chapter 1: Seven Is More Than Six. The Pigeon-Hole Principle (181 KB) Chapter 4: No Matter How You Slice It. The Binomial Theorem and Related Identities (228 KB) Chapter 15: Who Knows What It Looks Like,But It Exists. The Probabilistic Method (286 KB) Request Inspection Copy

A First Course in Enumerative Combinatorics provides an introduction to the fundamentals of enumeration for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students in the mathematical sciences. The book offers a careful and comprehensive account of the standard tools of enumeration—recursion, generating functions, sieve and inversion formulas, enumeration under group actions—and their application to counting problems for the fundamental structures of discrete mathematics, including sets and multisets, words and permutations, partitions of sets and integers, and graphs and trees. The author's exposition has been strongly influenced by the work of Rota and Stanley, highlighting bijective proofs, partially ordered sets, and an emphasis on organizing the subject under various unifying themes, including the theory of incidence algebras. In addition, there are distinctive chapters on the combinatorics of finite vector spaces, a detailed account of formal power series, and combinatorial number theory. The reader is assumed to have a knowledge of basic linear algebra and some familiarity with power series. There are over 200 well-designed exercises ranging in difficulty from straightforward to challenging. There are also sixteen large-scale honors projects on special topics appearing throughout the text. The author is a distinguished combinatorialist and award-winning teacher, and he is currently Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee. He has published widely in number theory, combinatorics, probability, decision theory, and formal epistemology. His Erdős number is 2.

This textbook offers the opportunity to create a uniquely engaging combinatorics classroom by embracing Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) techniques. Readers are provided with a carefully chosen progression of theorems to prove and problems to actively solve. Students will feel a sense of accomplishment as their collective inquiry traces a path from the basics to important generating function techniques. Beginning with an exploration of permutations and combinations that culminates in the Binomial Theorem, the text goes on to guide the study of ordinary and exponential generating functions. These tools underpin the in-depth study of Eulerian, Catalan, and Narayana numbers that follows, and a selection of advanced topics that includes applications to probability and number theory. Throughout, the theory unfolds via over 150 carefully selected problems for students to solve, many of which connect to state-of-the-art research. Inquiry-Based Enumerative Combinatorics is ideal for lower-division undergraduate students majoring in math or computer science, as there are no formal mathematics prerequisites. Because it includes many connections to recent research, students of any level who are interested in combinatorics will also find this a valuable resource.

This is a textbook for an introductory combinatorics course that can take up 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 edition, 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 for the talented and hard-working 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 and Eulerian and Hamiltonian cycles. The selected advanced topics are: Ramsey theory, pattern avoidance, the probabilistic method, partially ordered sets, 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.

An introduction to enumerative combinatorics, vital to many areas of mathematics. It is suitable as a class text or for individual study.