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 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.

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.

Combinatorics, Second Edition is a well-rounded, general introduction to the subjects of enumerative, bijective, and algebraic combinatorics. The textbook emphasizes bijective proofs, which provide elegant solutions to counting problems by setting up one-to-one correspondences between two sets of combinatorial objects. The author has written the textbook to be accessible to readers without any prior background in abstract algebra or combinatorics. Part I of the second edition develops an array of mathematical tools to solve counting problems: basic counting rules, recursions, inclusion-exclusion techniques, generating functions, bijective proofs, and linear algebraic methods. These tools are used to analyze combinatorial structures such as words, permutations, subsets, functions, graphs, trees, lattice paths, and much more. Part II cover topics in algebraic combinatorics including group actions, permutation statistics, symmetric functions, and tableau combinatorics. This edition provides greater coverage of the use of ordinary and exponential generating functions as a problem-solving tool. Along with two new chapters, several new sections, and improved exposition throughout, the textbook is brimming with many examples and exercises of various levels of difficulty.

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

A clear and self-contained introduction to discrete mathematics for undergraduates and early graduates.

The notes that eventually became this book were written between 1977 and 1985 for the course called Constructive Combinatorics at the University of Minnesota. This is a one-quarter (10 week) course for upper level undergraduate students. The class usually consists of mathematics and computer science majors, with an occasional engineering student. Several graduate students in computer science also attend. At Minnesota, Constructive Combinatorics is the third quarter of a three quarter sequence. The fIrst quarter, Enumerative Combinatorics, is at the level of the texts by Bogart [Bo], Brualdi [Br], Liu [Li] or Tucker [Tu] and is a prerequisite for this course. The second quarter, Graph Theory and Optimization, is not a prerequisite. We assume that the students are familiar with the techniques of enumeration: basic counting principles, generating functions and inclusion/exclusion. This course evolved from a course on combinatorial algorithms. That course contained a mixture of graph algorithms, optimization and listing algorithms. The computer assignments generally consisted of testing algorithms on examples. While we felt that such material was useful and not without mathematical content, we did not think that the course had a coherent mathematical focus. Furthermore, much of it was being taught, or could have been taught, elsewhere. Graph algorithms and optimization, for instance, were inserted into the graph theory course where they naturally belonged. The computer science department already taught some of the material: the simpler algorithms in a discrete mathematics course; effIciency of algorithms in a more advanced course.