This volume collects together research and survey papers written by invited speakers of the conference celebrating the 70th birthday of Laszlo Lovasz. The topics covered include classical subjects such as extremal graph theory, coding theory, design theory, applications of linear algebra and combinatorial optimization, as well as recent trends such as extensions of graph limits, online or statistical versions of classical combinatorial problems, and new methods of derandomization. Laszlo Lovasz is one of the pioneers in the interplay between discrete and continuous mathematics, and is a master at establishing unexpected connections, "building bridges" between seemingly distant fields. His invariably elegant and powerful ideas have produced new subfields in many areas, and his outstanding scientific work has defined and shaped many research directions in the last 50 years. The 14 contributions presented in this volume, all of which are connected to Laszlo Lovasz's areas of research, offer an excellent overview of the state of the art of combinatorics and related topics and will be of interest to experienced specialists as well as young researchers.

This open access book offers an innovative account of how relief organizations' visual depiction of Syrian displacement contributes to reproduce and reinforce a securitized account of refugees. Through visual analysis, the book demonstrates how the securitization process takes place in three different ways. First of all, even if marginally, it occurs through the reproduction of mainstream media and political accounts that have depicted refugees in terms of threats. Secondly, and more consistently, through a representation of Syrian displaced people that, despite the undeniable innovative aesthetic patterns focusing on dignity and empowerment, continue to reinforce a visual narrative around refugees in terms of victimhood and passivity. The reproduction of a securitized account takes also place through the dialectic between what is made visible in the pictures and what is not. At the same time the book identifies visual glimmers and minor displacements in the humanitarian discourse that have the potentiality to produce alternative discourses on refugees and displacement beyond the mainstream securitized ones. By showing how relief organizations' visual representation contributes to the securitization of the refugee issue, this book provides a great resource to students and academics in migration, visuality, humanitarianism and securitization, as well as social scientists and policy-makers.

Approximate groups have shot to prominence in recent years, driven both by rapid progress in the field itself and by a varied and expanding range of applications. This text collects, for the first time in book form, the main concepts and techniques into a single, self-contained introduction. The author presents a number of recent developments in the field, including an exposition of his recent result classifying nilpotent approximate groups. The book also features a considerable amount of previously unpublished material, as well as numerous exercises and motivating examples. It closes with a substantial chapter on applications, including an exposition of Breuillard, Green and Tao's celebrated approximate-group proof of Gromov's theorem on groups of polynomial growth. Written by an author who is at the forefront of both researching and teaching this topic, this text will be useful to advanced students and to researchers working in approximate groups and related areas.

This book gives the state-of-the-art on transversals in linear uniform hypergraphs. The notion of transversal is fundamental to hypergraph theory and has been studied extensively. Very few articles have discussed bounds on the transversal number for linear hypergraphs, even though these bounds are integral components in many applications. This book is one of the first to give strong non-trivial bounds on the transversal number for linear hypergraphs. The discussion may lead to further study of those problems which have not been solved completely, and may also inspire the readers to raise new questions and research directions. The book is written with two readerships in mind. The first is the graduate student who may wish to work on open problems in the area or is interested in exploring the field of transversals in hypergraphs. This exposition will go far to familiarize the student with the subject, the research techniques, and the major accomplishments in the field. The photographs included allow the reader to associate faces with several researchers who made important discoveries and contributions to the subject. The second audience is the established researcher in hypergraph theory who will benefit from having easy access to known results and latest developments in the field of transversals in linear hypergraphs.

This volume comprises papers presented at the Third Isle of Thorns Conference on Finite Geometries and Designs. The papers explore the structure and associated incidence structures of Galois geometries, and their related automorphism groups. Among the main topics covered are generalized quadrangles and n-gons, groups acting on geometries, linear spaces, partial geometries, diagram geometries, non-Desarguesian planes, strongly regular graphs, and designs. This timely collection of articles is expertly presented and will be of interest to research workers and postgraduates in combinatorics, design theory, and finite geometries.

This volume provides accessible and self-contained research problems designed for undergraduate student projects, and simultaneously promotes the development of sustainable undergraduate research programs. The chapters in this work span a variety of topical areas of pure and applied mathematics and mathematics education. Each chapter gives a self-contained introduction on a research topic with an emphasis on the specific tools and knowledge needed to create and maintain fruitful research programs for undergraduates. Some of the topics discussed include:* Disease modeling* Tropical curves and surfaces* Numerical semigroups* Mathematics EducationThis volume will primarily appeal to undergraduate students interested in pursuing research projects and faculty members seeking to mentor them. It may also aid students and faculty participating in independent studies and capstone projects.

Oriented matroids play the role of matrices in discrete geometry, when metrical properties, such as angles or distances, are neither required nor available. Thus they are of great use in such areas as graph theory, combinatorial optimization and convex geometry. The variety of applications corresponds to the variety of ways they can be defined. Each of these definitions corresponds to a differing data structure for an oriented matroid, and handling them requires computational support, best realised through a functional language. Haskell is used here, and, for the benefit of readers, the book includes a primer on it. The combination of concrete applications and computation, the profusion of illustrations, many in colour, and the large number of examples and exercises make this an ideal introductory text on the subject. It will also be valuable for self-study for mathematicians and computer scientists working in discrete and computational geometry.

The contributions included in the volume are drawn from presentations at ODS2019 - International Conference on Optimization and Decision Science, which was the 49th annual meeting of the Italian Operations Research Society (AIRO) held at Genoa, Italy, on 4-7 September 2019. This book presents very recent results in the field of Optimization and Decision Science. While the book is addressed primarily to the Operations Research (OR) community, the interdisciplinary contents ensure that it will also be of very high interest for scholars and researchers from many scientific disciplines, including computer sciences, economics, mathematics, and engineering. Operations Research is known as the discipline of optimization applied to real-world problems and to complex decision-making fields. The focus is on mathematical and quantitative methods aimed at determining optimal or near-optimal solutions in acceptable computation times. This volume not only presents theoretical results but also covers real industrial applications, making it interesting for practitioners facing decision problems in logistics, manufacturing production, and services. Readers will accordingly find innovative ideas from both a methodological and an applied perspective.

This book covers pattern recognition techniques applied to various areas of biomedicine, including disease diagnosis and prognosis, and several problems of classification, with a special focus on-but not limited to-pattern recognition modeling of biomedical signals and images. Multidisciplinary by definition, the book's topic blends computing, mathematics and other technical sciences towards the development of computational tools and methodologies that can be applied to pattern recognition processes. In this work, the efficacy of such methods and techniques for processing medical information is analyzed and compared, and auxiliary criteria for determining the correct diagnosis and treatment strategies are recommended and applied. Researchers in applied mathematics, the computer sciences, engineering and related fields with a focus on medical applications will benefit from this book, as well as professionals with a special interest in state-of-the-art pattern recognition techniques as applied to biomedicine.

Die Theorie der regularen Graphen (The Theory of Regular Graphs), written by the Danish Mathematician Julius Petersen in 1891, is often considered the first strictly theoretical paper dealing with graphs. In the 130 years since then, regular graphs have been a common and popular area of study. While regular graphs are typically considered to be graphs whose vertices all have the same degree, a more general interpretation is that of graphs possessing some common characteristic throughout their structure. During the past several decades, however, there has been some increased interest in investigating graphs possessing a property that is, in a sense, opposite to regularity. It is this topic with which this book deals, giving rise to a study of what might be called irregularity in graphs. Here, various irregularity concepts dealing with several topics in graph theory are described, such as degrees of vertices, graph labelings, weightings, colorings, graph structures, Eulerian and Hamiltonian properties, graph decompositions, and Ramsey-type problems.

Honesty in voting, it turns out, is not always the best policy. Indeed, in the early 1970s, Allan Gibbard and Mark Satterthwaite, building on the seminal work of Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow, proved that with three or more alternatives there is no reasonable voting system that is non-manipulable; voters will always have an opportunity to benefit by submitting a disingenuous ballot. The ensuing decades produced a number of theorems of striking mathematical naturality that dealt with the manipulability of voting systems. This 2005 book presents many of these results from the last quarter of the twentieth century, especially the contributions of economists and philosophers, from a mathematical point of view, with many new proofs. The presentation is almost completely self-contained, and requires no prerequisites except a willingness to follow rigorous mathematical arguments. Mathematics students, as well as mathematicians, political scientists, economists and philosophers will learn why it is impossible to devise a completely unmanipulable voting system.

This concise monograph present the complete history of the domination game and its variants up to the most recent developments and will stimulate research on closely related topics, establishing a key reference for future developments. The crux of the discussion surrounds new methods and ideas that were developed within the theory, led by the imagination strategy, the Continuation Principle, and the discharging method of Bujtas, to prove results about domination game invariants. A toolbox of proof techniques is provided for the reader to obtain results on the domination game and its variants. Powerful proof methods such as the imagination strategy are presented. The Continuation Principle is developed, which provides a much-used monotonicity property of the game domination number. In addition, the reader is exposed to the discharging method of Bujtas. The power of this method was shown by improving the known upper bound, in terms of a graph's order, on the (ordinary) domination number of graphs with minimum degree between 5 and 50. The book is intended primarily for students in graph theory as well as established graph theorists and it can be enjoyed by anyone with a modicum of mathematical maturity. The authors include exact results for several families of graphs, present what is known about the domination game played on subgraphs and trees, and provide the reader with the computational complexity aspects of domination games. Versions of the games which involve only the "slow" player yield the Grundy domination numbers, which connect the topic of the book with some concepts from linear algebra such as zero-forcing sets and minimum rank. More than a dozen other related games on graphs and hypergraphs are presented in the book. In all these games there are problems waiting to be solved, so the area is rich for further research. The domination game belongs to the growing family of competitive optimization graph games. The game is played by two competitors who take turns adding a vertex to a set of chosen vertices. They collaboratively produce a special structure in the underlying host graph, namely a dominating set. The two players have complementary goals: one seeks to minimize the size of the chosen set while the other player tries to make it as large as possible. The game is not one that is either won or lost. Instead, if both players employ an optimal strategy that is consistent with their goals, the cardinality of the chosen set is a graphical invariant, called the game domination number of the graph. To demonstrate that this is indeed a graphical invariant, the game tree of a domination game played on a graph is presented for the first time in the literature.

The inverse scattering problem is central to many areas of science and technology such as radar, sonar, medical imaging, geophysical exploration and nondestructive testing. This book is devoted to the mathematical and numerical analysis of the inverse scattering problem for acoustic and electromagnetic waves. In this fourth edition, a number of significant additions have been made including a new chapter on transmission eigenvalues and a new section on the impedance boundary condition where particular attention has been made to the generalized impedance boundary condition and to nonlocal impedance boundary conditions. Brief discussions on the generalized linear sampling method, the method of recursive linearization, anisotropic media and the use of target signatures in inverse scattering theory have also been added.

The rapidly expanding area of algebraic graph theory uses two different branches of algebra to explore various aspects of graph theory: linear algebra (for spectral theory) and group theory (for studying graph symmetry). These areas have links with other areas of mathematics, such as logic and harmonic analysis, and are increasingly being used in such areas as computer networks where symmetry is an important feature. Other books cover portions of this material, but this book is unusual in covering both of these aspects and there are no other books with such a wide scope. Peter J. Cameron, internationally recognized for his substantial contributions to the area, served as academic consultant for this volume, and the result is ten expository chapters written by acknowledged international experts in the field. Their well-written contributions have been carefully edited to enhance readability and to standardize the chapter structure, terminology and notation throughout the book. To help the reader, there is an extensive introductory chapter that covers the basic background material in graph theory, linear algebra and group theory. Each chapter concludes with an extensive list of references.

This book provides a detailed description of network science concepts applied to power systems and electricity markets, offering an appropriate blend of theoretical background and practical applications for operation and power system planning. It discusses an approach to understanding power systems from a network science perspective using the direct recognition of the interconnectivity provided by the transmission system. Further, it explores the network properties in detail and characterizes them as a tool for online and offline applications for power system operation. The book includes an in-depth explanation of electricity markets problems that can be addressed from a graph theory perspective. It is intended for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of electric energy systems, operations research, management science and economics. Practitioners in the electric energy sector also benefit from the concepts and techniques presented here.

Comprehensive presentation of both analytic and probabilistic techniques

As a comprehensive survey of the major techniques of average case analysis, this work presents, in detail, both analytic methods used for well-structured algorithms and probabilistic methods used for more structurally complex algorithms. In particular, the applications in the book use algorithms that focus on data structures on sequences, also called strings, which are widely used in computer science, computational biology, and information theory. Specific techniques covered include the inclusion-exclusion principle, the first and second moment methods, the random coding technique, the subadditive ergodic theorem, large deviations, generating functions, complex asymptotic methods, the Mellin transform, and analytic poissonization and depoissonization. Each method is clearly explained and accompanied by related applications and problems involving algorithms on sequences.

Important features of the book include:

• A foreword by well-known expert Dr. Philippe Flajolet, INRIA, France
• Presentation of complex analysis used to solve discrete and probabilistic problems on sequences
• Discussions of Lempel-Ziv data compression-schemes, the string edit problem, pattern matching algorithms, many variations of digital trees, the leader election algorithm, and more
• A chapter devoted to tools used in information theory, particularly the random coding technique and pattern matching approach to data compression
• Application sections in each chapter that illustrate the methods covered
• An extensive bibliography

Rosemary Bailey covers in this study the mathematics of association schemes--an area lying between pure mathematics and statistics that relates to the optimal design of scientific experiments. The book is accessible to mathematicians as well as statisticians. Arising from a graduate course taught by the author, it appeals to students as well as researchers as a valuable reference work from which to learn about the statistical/combinatorial aspects of their work.

This textbook explores probability and stochastic processes at a level that does not require any prior knowledge except basic calculus. It presents the fundamental concepts in a step-by-step manner, and offers remarks and warnings for deeper insights. The chapters include basic examples, which are revisited as the new concepts are introduced. To aid learning, figures and diagrams are used to help readers grasp the concepts, and the solutions to the exercises and problems. Further, a table format is also used where relevant for better comparison of the ideas and formulae. The first part of the book introduces readers to the essentials of probability, including combinatorial analysis, conditional probability, and discrete and continuous random variable. The second part then covers fundamental stochastic processes, including point, counting, renewal and regenerative processes, the Poisson process, Markov chains, queuing models and reliability theory. Primarily intended for undergraduate engineering students, it is also useful for graduate-level students wanting to refresh their knowledge of the basics of probability and stochastic processes.

This book reports on advanced concepts in fuzzy graph theory, showing a set of tools that can be successfully applied to understanding and modeling illegal human trafficking. Building on the previous book on fuzzy graph by the same authors, which set the fundamentals for readers to understand this developing field of research, this second book gives a special emphasis to applications of the theory. For this, authors introduce new concepts, such as intuitionistic fuzzy graphs, the concept of independence and domination in fuzzy graphs, as well as directed fuzzy networks, incidence graphs and many more.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Computing and Combinatorics, COCOON 2020, held in Atlanta, GA, USA, in August 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic COCOON 2020 was organized as a fully online conference. The 54 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 126 submissions. The papers cover various topics, including algorithm design, approximation algorithm, graph theory, complexity theory, problem solving, optimization, computational biology, computational learning, communication network, logic, and game theory.

The primary purpose of this textbook is to introduce the reader to a wide variety of elementary permutation statistical methods. Permutation methods are optimal for small data sets and non-random samples, and are free of distributional assumptions. The book follows the conventional structure of most introductory books on statistical methods, and features chapters on central tendency and variability, one-sample tests, two-sample tests, matched-pairs tests, one-way fully-randomized analysis of variance, one-way randomized-blocks analysis of variance, simple regression and correlation, and the analysis of contingency tables. In addition, it introduces and describes a comparatively new permutation-based, chance-corrected measure of effect size. Because permutation tests and measures are distribution-free, do not assume normality, and do not rely on squared deviations among sample values, they are currently being applied in a wide variety of disciplines. This book presents permutation alternatives to existing classical statistics, and is intended as a textbook for undergraduate statistics courses or graduate courses in the natural, social, and physical sciences, while assuming only an elementary grasp of statistics.

Graduate students and researchers in applied mathematics, optimization, engineering, computer science, and management science will find this book a useful reference which provides an introduction to applications and fundamental theories in nonlinear combinatorial optimization. Nonlinear combinatorial optimization is a new research area within combinatorial optimization and includes numerous applications to technological developments, such as wireless communication, cloud computing, data science, and social networks. Theoretical developments including discrete Newton methods, primal-dual methods with convex relaxation, submodular optimization, discrete DC program, along with several applications are discussed and explored in this book through articles by leading experts.

Combinatorics on words has arisen independently within several branches of mathematics, for instance, number theory, group theory and probability, and appears frequently in problems related to theoretical computer science. The first unified treatment of the area was given in Lothaire's Combinatorics on Words. Since its publication, the area has developed and the authors now aim to present several more topics as well as giving deeper insights into subjects that were discussed in the previous volume. An introductory chapter provides the reader with all the necessary background material. There are numerous examples, full proofs whenever possible and a notes section discussing further developments in the area. This book is both a comprehensive introduction to the subject and a valuable reference source for researchers.

Ordered structures have been increasingly recognized in recent years due to an explosion of interest in theoretical computer science and all areas of discrete mathematics. This book covers areas such as ordered sets and lattices. A key feature of ordered sets, one which is emphasized in the text, is that they can be represented pictorially. Lattices are also considered as algebraic structures and hence a purely algebraic study is used to reinforce the ideas of homomorphisms and of ideals encountered in group theory and ring theory. Exposure to elementary abstract algebra and the rotation of set theory are the only prerequisites for this text. For the new edition, much has been rewritten or expanded and new exercises have been added.

Presenting the state of the art, the Handbook of Enumerative Combinatorics brings together the work of today's most prominent researchers. The contributors survey the methods of combinatorial enumeration along with the most frequent applications of these methods. This important new work is edited by Miklos Bona of the University of Florida where he is a member of the Academy of Distinguished Teaching Scholars. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1997. Miklos is the author of four books and more than 65 research articles, including the award-winning Combinatorics of Permutations. Miklos Bona is an editor-in-chief for the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics and Series Editor of the Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications Series for CRC Press/Chapman and Hall. The first two chapters provide a comprehensive overview of the most frequently used methods in combinatorial enumeration, including algebraic, geometric, and analytic methods. These chapters survey generating functions, methods from linear algebra, partially ordered sets, polytopes, hyperplane arrangements, and matroids. Subsequent chapters illustrate applications of these methods for counting a wide array of objects. The contributors for this book represent an international spectrum of researchers with strong histories of results. The chapters are organized so readers advance from the more general ones, namely enumeration methods, towards the more specialized ones. Topics include coverage of asymptotic normality in enumeration, planar maps, graph enumeration, Young tableaux, unimodality, log-concavity, real zeros, asymptotic normality, trees, generalized Catalan paths, computerized enumeration schemes, enumeration of various graph classes, words, tilings, pattern avoidance, computer algebra, and parking functions. This book will be beneficial to a wide audience. It will appeal to experts on the topic interested in learning more about the finer points, readers interested in a systematic and organized treatment of the topic, and novices who are new to the field.