Ever since the discovery of the five platonic solids in ancient times, the study of symmetry and regularity has been one of the most fascinating aspects of mathematics. Quite often the arithmetical regularity properties of an object imply its uniqueness and the existence of many symmetries. This interplay between regularity and symmetry properties of graphs is the theme of this book. Starting from very elementary regularity properties, the concept of a distance-regular graph arises naturally as a common setting for regular graphs which are extremal in one sense or another. Several other important regular combinatorial structures are then shown to be equivalent to special families of distance-regular graphs. Other subjects of more general interest, such as regularity and extremal properties in graphs, association schemes, representations of graphs in euclidean space, groups and geometries of Lie type, groups acting on graphs, and codes are covered independently. Many new results and proofs and more than 750 references increase the encyclopaedic value of this book.

A self-contained account suited for a wide audience describing coding theory, combinatorial designs and their relations.

This book gives an elementary treatment of the basic material about graph spectra, both for ordinary, and Laplace and Seidel spectra. The text progresses systematically, by covering standard topics before presenting some new material on trees, strongly regular graphs, two-graphs, association schemes, p-ranks of configurations and similar topics. Exercises at the end of each chapter provide practice and vary from easy yet interesting applications of the treated theory, to little excursions into related topics. Tables, references at the end of the book, an author and subject index enrich the text. Spectra of Graphs is written for researchers, teachers and graduate students interested in graph spectra. The reader is assumed to be familiar with basic linear algebra and eigenvalues, although some more advanced topics in linear algebra, like the Perron-Frobenius theorem and eigenvalue interlacing are included.

This book is a monograph on unitals embedded in ?nite projective planes. Unitals are an interesting structure found in square order projective planes, and numerous research articles constructing and discussing these structures have appeared in print. More importantly, there still are many open pr- lems, and this remains a fruitful area for Ph.D. dissertations. Unitals play an important role in ?nite geometry as well as in related areas of mathematics. For example, unitals play a parallel role to Baer s- planes when considering extreme values for the size of a blocking set in a square order projective plane (see Section 2.3). Moreover, unitals meet the upper bound for the number of absolute points of any polarity in a square order projective plane (see Section 1.5). From an applications point of view, the linear codes arising from unitals have excellent technical properties (see 2 Section 6.4). The automorphism group of the classical unitalH =H(2,q ) is 2-transitive on the points ofH, and so unitals are of interest in group theory. In the ?eld of algebraic geometry over ?nite ?elds,H is a maximal curve that contains the largest number of F -rational points with respect to its genus, 2 q as established by the Hasse-Weil bound.

This monograph on strongly regular graphs is an invaluable reference for anybody working in algebraic combinatorics.

The purpose of this volume is to review the results in spectral graph theory which have appeared since 1978.The problem of characterizing graphs with least eigenvalue -2 was one of the original problems of spectral graph theory. The techniques used in the investigation of this problem have continued to be useful in other contexts including forbidden subgraph techniques as well as geometric methods involving root systems. In the meantime, the particular problem giving rise to these methods has been solved almost completely. This is indicated in Chapter 1.The study of various combinatorial objects (including distance regular and distance transitive graphs, association schemes, and block designs) have made use of eigenvalue techniques, usually as a method to show the nonexistence of objects with certain parameters. The basic method is to construct a graph which contains the structure of the combinatorial object and then to use the properties of the eigenvalues of the graph. Methods of this type are given in Chapter 2.Several topics have been included in Chapter 3, including the relationships between the spectrum and automorphism group of a graph, the graph isomorphism and the graph reconstruction problem, spectra of random graphs, and the Shannon capacity problem. Some graph polynomials related to the characteristic polynomial are described in Chapter 4. These include the matching, distance, and permanental polynomials. Applications of the theory of graph spectra to Chemistry and other branches of science are described from a mathematical viewpoint in Chapter 5. The last chapter is devoted to the extension of the theory of graph spectra to infinite graphs.