Combinatorics is a subject of increasing importance because of its links with computer science, statistics, and algebra. This textbook stresses common techniques (such as generating functions and recursive construction) that underlie the great variety of subject matter, and the fact that a constructive or algorithmic proof is more valuable than an existence proof. The author emphasizes techniques as well as topics and includes many algorithms described in simple terms. The text should provide essential background for students in all parts of discrete mathematics.

Discrete mathematics has been rising in prominence in the past fifty years, both as a tool with practical applications and as a source of new and interesting mathematics. The topics in discrete mathematics have become so well developed that it is easy to forget that common threads connect the different areas, and it is through discovering and using these connections that progress is often made. For over fifty years, Ron Graham has been able to illuminate some of these connections and has helped to bring the field of discrete mathematics to where it is today. To celebrate his contribution, this volume brings together many of the best researchers working in discrete mathematics, including Fan Chung, Erik D. Demaine, Persi Diaconis, Peter Frankl, Alfred W. Hales, Jeffrey C. Lagarias, Allen Knutson, Janos Pach, Carl Pomerance, N. J. A. Sloane, and of course, Ron Graham himself.

This book, written by experts from universities and major research laboratories, addresses the hot topic of network coding, a powerful scheme for information transmission in networks that yields near-optimal throughput. It introduces readers to this striking new approach to network coding, in which the network is not simply viewed as a mechanism for delivering packets, but rather an algebraic structure named the subspace, which these packets span. This leads to a new kind of coding theory, employing what are called subspace codes. The book presents selected, highly relevant advanced research output on: Subspace Codes and Rank Metric Codes; Finite Geometries and Subspace Designs; Application of Network Coding; Codes for Distributed Storage Systems. The outcomes reflect research conducted within the framework of the European COST Action IC1104: Random Network Coding and Designs over GF(q). Taken together, they offer communications engineers, R&D engineers, researchers and graduate students in Mathematics, Computer Science, and Electrical Engineering a comprehensive reference guide to the construction of optimal network codes, as well as efficient encoding and decoding schemes for a given network code.

Combining theoretical and practical aspects of topology, this book provides a comprehensive and self-contained introduction to topological methods for the analysis and visualization of scientific data. Theoretical concepts are presented in a painstaking but intuitive manner, with numerous high-quality color illustrations. Key algorithms for the computation and simplification of topological data representations are described in detail, and their application is carefully demonstrated in a chapter dedicated to concrete use cases. With its fine balance between theory and practice, "Topological Data Analysis for Scientific Visualization" constitutes an appealing introduction to the increasingly important topic of topological data analysis for lecturers, students and researchers.

This book, now in a thoroughly revised second edition, provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to modern set theory. Following an overview of basic notions in combinatorics and first-order logic, the author outlines the main topics of classical set theory in the second part, including Ramsey theory and the axiom of choice. The revised edition contains new permutation models and recent results in set theory without the axiom of choice. The third part explains the sophisticated technique of forcing in great detail, now including a separate chapter on Suslin's problem. The technique is used to show that certain statements are neither provable nor disprovable from the axioms of set theory. In the final part, some topics of classical set theory are revisited and further developed in light of forcing, with new chapters on Sacks Forcing and Shelah's astonishing construction of a model with finitely many Ramsey ultrafilters. Written for graduate students in axiomatic set theory, Combinatorial Set Theory will appeal to all researchers interested in the foundations of mathematics. With extensive reference lists and historical remarks at the end of each chapter, this book is suitable for self-study.

This book is intended as a teacher's manual and as an independent-study handbook for students and mathematical competitors. Based on a traditional teaching philosophy and a non-traditional writing approach (the stair-step method), this book consists of new problems with solutions created by the authors. The main idea of this approach is to start from relatively easy problems and "step-by-step" increase the level of difficulty toward effectively maximizing students' learning potential. In addition to providing solutions, a separate table of answers is also given at the end of the book. A broad view of mathematics is covered, well beyond the typical elementary level, by providing more in depth treatment of Geometry and Trigonometry, Number Theory, Algebra, Calculus, and Combinatorics.

Permutation groups, their fundamental theory and applications are discussed in this introductory book. It focuses on those groups that are most useful for studying symmetric structures such as graphs, codes and designs. Modern treatments of the O'Nan-Scott theory are presented not only for primitive permutation groups but also for the larger families of quasiprimitive and innately transitive groups, including several classes of infinite permutation groups. Their precision is sharpened by the introduction of a cartesian decomposition concept. This facilitates reduction arguments for primitive groups analogous to those, using orbits and partitions, that reduce problems about general permutation groups to primitive groups. The results are particularly powerful for finite groups, where the finite simple group classification is invoked. Applications are given in algebra and combinatorics to group actions that preserve cartesian product structures. Students and researchers with an interest in mathematical symmetry will find the book enjoyable and useful.

Based on talks from the 2015 and 2016 Combinatorial and Additive Number Theory (CANT) workshops at the City University of New York, these proceedings offer 19 peer-reviewed and edited papers on current topics in number theory. Held every year since 2003, the workshop series surveys state-of-the-art open problems in combinatorial and additive number theory and related parts of mathematics. Sumsets, partitions, convex polytopes and discrete geometry, Ramsey theory, primality testing, and cryptography are among the topics featured in this volume. Each contribution is dedicated to a specific topic that reflects the latest results by experts in the field. Researchers and graduate students interested in the current progress in number theory will find this selection of articles relevant and compelling.

The goal of this monograph is to give an accessible introduction to nonstandard methods and their applications, with an emphasis on combinatorics and Ramsey theory. It includes both new nonstandard proofs of classical results and recent developments initially obtained in the nonstandard setting. This makes it the first combinatorics-focused account of nonstandard methods to be aimed at a general (graduate-level) mathematical audience. This book will provide a natural starting point for researchers interested in approaching the rapidly growing literature on combinatorial results obtained via nonstandard methods. The primary audience consists of graduate students and specialists in logic and combinatorics who wish to pursue research at the interface between these areas.

This monograph provides a self-contained introduction to symmetric functions and their use in enumerative combinatorics. It is the first book to explore many of the methods and results that the authors present. Numerous exercises are included throughout, along with full solutions, to illustrate concepts and also highlight many interesting mathematical ideas. The text begins by introducing fundamental combinatorial objects such as permutations and integer partitions, as well as generating functions. Symmetric functions are considered in the next chapter, with a unique emphasis on the combinatorics of the transition matrices between bases of symmetric functions. Chapter 3 uses this introductory material to describe how to find an assortment of generating functions for permutation statistics, and then these techniques are extended to find generating functions for a variety of objects in Chapter 4. The next two chapters present the Robinson-Schensted-Knuth algorithm and a method for proving Polya's enumeration theorem using symmetric functions. Chapters 7 and 8 are more specialized than the preceding ones, covering consecutive pattern matches in permutations, words, cycles, and alternating permutations and introducing the reciprocity method as a way to define ring homomorphisms with desirable properties. Counting with Symmetric Functions will appeal to graduate students and researchers in mathematics or related subjects who are interested in counting methods, generating functions, or symmetric functions. The unique approach taken and results and exercises explored by the authors make it an important contribution to the mathematical literature.

This book consists of contributions from experts, presenting a fruitful interplay between different approaches to discrete geometry. Most of the chapters were collected at the conference "Geometry and Symmetry" in Veszprem, Hungary from 29 June to 3 July 2015. The conference was dedicated to Karoly Bezdek and Egon Schulte on the occasion of their 60th birthdays, acknowledging their highly regarded contributions in these fields. While the classical problems of discrete geometry have a strong connection to geometric analysis, coding theory, symmetry groups, and number theory, their connection to combinatorics and optimization has become of particular importance. The last decades have seen a revival of interest in discrete geometric structures and their symmetry. The rapid development of abstract polytope theory has resulted in a rich theory featuring an attractive interplay of methods and tools from discrete geometry, group theory and geometry, combinatorial group theory, and hyperbolic geometry and topology. This book contains papers on new developments in these areas, including convex and abstract polytopes and their recent generalizations, tiling and packing, zonotopes, isoperimetric inequalities, and on the geometric and combinatorial aspects of linear optimization. The book is a valuable resource for researchers, both junior and senior, in the field of discrete geometry, combinatorics, or discrete optimization. Graduate students find state-of-the-art surveys and an open problem collection.

This collaborative book presents recent trends on the study of sequences, including combinatorics on words and symbolic dynamics, and new interdisciplinary links to group theory and number theory. Other chapters branch out from those areas into subfields of theoretical computer science, such as complexity theory and theory of automata. The book is built around four general themes: number theory and sequences, word combinatorics, normal numbers, and group theory. Those topics are rounded out by investigations into automatic and regular sequences, tilings and theory of computation, discrete dynamical systems, ergodic theory, numeration systems, automaton semigroups, and amenable groups. This volume is intended for use by graduate students or research mathematicians, as well as computer scientists who are working in automata theory and formal language theory. With its organization around unified themes, it would also be appropriate as a supplemental text for graduate level courses.

This volume examines mathematics as a product of the human mind and analyzes the language of "pure mathematics" from various advanced-level sources. Through analysis of the foundational texts of mathematics, it is demonstrated that math is a complex literary creation, containing objects, actors, actions, projection, prediction, planning, explanation, evaluation, roles, image schemas, metonymy, conceptual blending, and, of course, (natural) language. The book follows the narrative of mathematics in a typical order of presentation for a standard university-level algebra course, beginning with analysis of set theory and mappings and continuing along a path of increasing complexity. At each stage, primary concepts, axioms, definitions, and proofs will be examined in an effort to unfold the tell-tale traces of the basic human cognitive patterns of story and conceptual blending. This book will be of interest to mathematicians, teachers of mathematics, cognitive scientists, cognitive linguists, and anyone interested in the engaging question of how mathematics works and why it works so well.

Contributions in this volume focus on computationally efficient algorithms and rigorous mathematical theories for analyzing large-scale networks. Researchers and students in mathematics, economics, statistics, computer science and engineering will find this collection a valuable resource filled with the latest research in network analysis. Computational aspects and applications of large-scale networks in market models, neural networks, social networks, power transmission grids, maximum clique problem, telecommunication networks, and complexity graphs are included with new tools for efficient network analysis of large-scale networks. This proceeding is a result of the 7th International Conference in Network Analysis, held at the Higher School of Economics, Nizhny Novgorod in June 2017. The conference brought together scientists, engineers, and researchers from academia, industry, and government.

This book brings together the latest research in this new and exciting area of visualization, looking at classifying and modelling cognitive biases, together with user studies which reveal their undesirable impact on human judgement, and demonstrating how visual analytic techniques can provide effective support for mitigating key biases. A comprehensive coverage of this very relevant topic is provided though this collection of extended papers from the successful DECISIVe workshop at IEEE VIS, together with an introduction to cognitive biases and an invited chapter from a leading expert in intelligence analysis. Cognitive Biases in Visualizations will be of interest to a wide audience from those studying cognitive biases to visualization designers and practitioners. It offers a choice of research frameworks, help with the design of user studies, and proposals for the effective measurement of biases. The impact of human visualization literacy, competence and human cognition on cognitive biases are also examined, as well as the notion of system-induced biases. The well referenced chapters provide an excellent starting point for gaining an awareness of the detrimental effect that some cognitive biases can have on users' decision-making. Human behavior is complex and we are only just starting to unravel the processes involved and investigate ways in which the computer can assist, however the final section supports the prospect that visual analytics, in particular, can counter some of the more common cognitive errors, which have been proven to be so costly.

Computational Complexity of Counting and Sampling provides readers with comprehensive and detailed coverage of the subject of computational complexity. It is primarily geared toward researchers in enumerative combinatorics, discrete mathematics, and theoretical computer science. The book covers the following topics: Counting and sampling problems that are solvable in polynomial running time, including holographic algorithms; #P-complete counting problems; and approximation algorithms for counting and sampling. First, it opens with the basics, such as the theoretical computer science background and dynamic programming algorithms. Later, the book expands its scope to focus on advanced topics, like stochastic approximations of counting discrete mathematical objects and holographic algorithms. After finishing the book, readers will agree that the subject is well covered, as the book starts with the basics and gradually explores the more complex aspects of the topic. Features: Each chapter includes exercises and solutions Ideally written for researchers and scientists Covers all aspects of the topic, beginning with a solid introduction, before shifting to computational complexity's more advanced features, with a focus on counting and sampling

This comprehensive textbook on combinatorial optimization places special emphasis on theoretical results and algorithms with provably good performance, in contrast to heuristics. It is based on numerous courses on combinatorial optimization and specialized topics, mostly at graduate level. This book reviews the fundamentals, covers the classical topics (paths, flows, matching, matroids, NP-completeness, approximation algorithms) in detail, and proceeds to advanced and recent topics, some of which have not appeared in a textbook before. Throughout, it contains complete but concise proofs, and also provides numerous exercises and references. This sixth edition has again been updated, revised, and significantly extended. Among other additions, there are new sections on shallow-light trees, submodular function maximization, smoothed analysis of the knapsack problem, the (ln 4+e)-approximation for Steiner trees, and the VPN theorem. Thus, this book continues to represent the state of the art of combinatorial optimization.

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.

The connective constant of a quasi-transitive infinite graph is a measure for the asymptotic growth rate of the number of self-avoiding walks of length n from a given starting vertex. On edge-labelled graphs the formal language of self-avoiding walks is generated by a formal grammar, which can be used to calculate the connective constant of the graph. Christian Lindorfer discusses the methods in some examples, including the infinite ladder-graph and the sandwich of two regular infinite trees.

A key element of any modern video codec is the efficient exploitation of temporal redundancy via motion-compensated prediction. In this book, a novel paradigm of representing and employing motion information in a video compression system is described that has several advantages over existing approaches. Traditionally, motion is estimated, modelled, and coded as a vector field at the target frame it predicts. While this "prediction-centric" approach is convenient, the fact that the motion is "attached" to a specific target frame implies that it cannot easily be re-purposed to predict or synthesize other frames, which severely hampers temporal scalability. In light of this, the present book explores the possibility of anchoring motion at reference frames instead. Key to the success of the proposed "reference-based" anchoring schemes is high quality motion inference, which is enabled by the use of a more "physical" motion representation than the traditionally employed "block" motion fields. The resulting compression system can support computationally efficient, high-quality temporal motion inference, which requires half as many coded motion fields as conventional codecs. Furthermore, "features" beyond compressibility - including high scalability, accessibility, and "intrinsic" framerate upsampling - can be seamlessly supported. These features are becoming ever more relevant as the way video is consumed continues shifting from the traditional broadcast scenario to interactive browsing of video content over heterogeneous networks. This book is of interest to researchers and professionals working in multimedia signal processing, in particular those who are interested in next-generation video compression. Two comprehensive background chapters on scalable video compression and temporal frame interpolation make the book accessible for students and newcomers to the field.

This edited volume presents advances in modeling and computational analysis techniques related to networks and online communities. It contains the best papers of notable scientists from the 4th European Network Intelligence Conference (ENIC 2017) that have been peer reviewed and expanded into the present format. The aim of this text is to share knowledge and experience as well as to present recent advances in the field. The book is a nice mix of basic research topics such as data-based centrality measures along with intriguing applied topics, for example, interaction decay patterns in online social communities. This book will appeal to students, professors, and researchers working in the fields of data science, computational social science, and social network analysis.

This monograph presents a unified exposition of latin squares and mutually orthogonal sets of latin squares based on groups. Its focus is on orthomorphisms and complete mappings of finite groups, while also offering a complete proof of the Hall-Paige conjecture. The use of latin squares in constructions of nets, affine planes, projective planes, and transversal designs also motivates this inquiry. The text begins by introducing fundamental concepts, like the tests for determining whether a latin square is based on a group, as well as orthomorphisms and complete mappings. From there, it describes the existence problem for complete mappings of groups, building up to the proof of the Hall-Paige conjecture. The third part presents a comprehensive study of orthomorphism graphs of groups, while the last part provides a discussion of Cartesian projective planes, related combinatorial structures, and a list of open problems. Expanding the author's 1992 monograph, Orthomorphism Graphs of Groups, this book is an essential reference tool for mathematics researchers or graduate students tackling latin square problems in combinatorics. Its presentation draws on a basic understanding of finite group theory, finite field theory, linear algebra, and elementary number theory-more advanced theories are introduced in the text as needed.

Descriptive complexity theory establishes a connection between the computational complexity of algorithmic problems (the computational resources required to solve the problems) and their descriptive complexity (the language resources required to describe the problems). This groundbreaking book approaches descriptive complexity from the angle of modern structural graph theory, specifically graph minor theory. It develops a 'definable structure theory' concerned with the logical definability of graph theoretic concepts such as tree decompositions and embeddings. The first part starts with an introduction to the background, from logic, complexity, and graph theory, and develops the theory up to first applications in descriptive complexity theory and graph isomorphism testing. It may serve as the basis for a graduate-level course. The second part is more advanced and mainly devoted to the proof of a single, previously unpublished theorem: properties of graphs with excluded minors are decidable in polynomial time if, and only if, they are definable in fixed-point logic with counting.

Analytic Combinatorics: A Multidimensional Approach is written in a reader-friendly fashion to better facilitate the understanding of the subject. Naturally, it is a firm introduction to the concept of analytic combinatorics and is a valuable tool to help readers better understand the structure and large-scale behavior of discrete objects. Primarily, the textbook is a gateway to the interactions between complex analysis and combinatorics. The study will lead readers through connections to number theory, algebraic geometry, probability and formal language theory. The textbook starts by discussing objects that can be enumerated using generating functions, such as tree classes and lattice walks. It also introduces multivariate generating functions including the topics of the kernel method, and diagonal constructions. The second part explains methods of counting these objects, which involves deep mathematics coming from outside combinatorics, such as complex analysis and geometry. Features Written with combinatorics-centric exposition to illustrate advanced analytic techniques Each chapter includes problems, exercises, and reviews of the material discussed in them Includes a comprehensive glossary, as well as lists of figures and symbols About the author Marni Mishna is a professor of mathematics at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. Her research investigates interactions between discrete structures and many diverse areas such as representation theory, functional equation theory, and algebraic geometry. Her specialty is the development of analytic tools to study the large-scale behavior of discrete objects.

The Art of Proving Binomial Identities accomplishes two goals: (1) It provides a unified treatment of the binomial coefficients, and (2) Brings together much of the undergraduate mathematics curriculum via one theme (the binomial coefficients). The binomial coefficients arise in a variety of areas of mathematics: combinatorics, of course, but also basic algebra (binomial theorem), infinite series (Newton's binomial series), differentiation (Leibniz's generalized product rule), special functions (the beta and gamma functions), probability, statistics, number theory, finite difference calculus, algorithm analysis, and even statistical mechanics. The book is very suitable for advanced undergraduates or beginning graduate students and includes various exercises asking them to prove identities. Students will find that the text and notes at the end of the chapters encourages them to look at binomial coefficients from different angles. With this learning experience, students will be able to understand binomial coefficients in a new way. Features: Provides a unified treatment of many of the techniques for proving binomial coefficient identities. Ties together several of the courses in the undergraduate mathematics curriculum via a single theme. A textbook for a capstone or senior seminar course in mathematics. Contains several results by the author on proof techniques for binomial coefficients that are not well-known. Ideal for self-study, it contains a large number of exercises at the end of each chapter, with hints or solutions for every exercise at the end of the book.