Graphs drawn on two-dimensional surfaces have always attracted researchers by their beauty and by the variety of difficult questions to which they give rise. The theory of such embedded graphs, which long seemed rather isolated, has witnessed the appearance of entirely unexpected new applications in recent decades, ranging from Galois theory to quantum gravity models, and has become a kind of a focus of a vast field of research. The book provides an accessible introduction to this new domain, including such topics as coverings of Riemann surfaces, the Galois group action on embedded graphs (Grothendieck's theory of "dessins d'enfants"), the matrix integral method, moduli spaces of curves, the topology of meromorphic functions, and combinatorial aspects of Vassiliev's knot invariants and, in an appendix by Don Zagier, the use of finite group representation theory. The presentation is concrete throughout, with numerous figures, examples (including computer calculations) and exercises, and should appeal to both graduate students and researchers.

The French expression "dessins d'enfants'' means children's drawings. This term was coined by the great French mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck in order to denominate a method of pictorial representation of some highly interesting classes of polynomials and rational functions. The polynomials studied in this book take their origin in number theory. The authors show how, by drawing simple pictures, one can prove some long-standing conjectures and formulate new ones. The theory presented here touches upon many different fields of mathematics. The major part of the book is quite elementary and is easily accessible to an undergraduate student. The less elementary parts, such as Galois theory or group representations and their characters, would need a more profound knowledge of mathematics. The reader may either take the basic facts of these theories for granted or use our book as a motivation and a first approach to these subjects.

Graphs drawn on two-dimensional surfaces have always attracted researchers by their beauty and by the variety of difficult questions to which they give rise. The theory of such embedded graphs, which long seemed rather isolated, has witnessed the appearance of entirely unexpected new applications in recent decades, ranging from Galois theory to quantum gravity models, and has become a kind of a focus of a vast field of research. The book provides an accessible introduction to this new domain, including such topics as coverings of Riemann surfaces, the Galois group action on embedded graphs (Grothendieck's theory of "dessins d'enfants"), the matrix integral method, moduli spaces of curves, the topology of meromorphic functions, and combinatorial aspects of Vassiliev's knot invariants and, in an appendix by Don Zagier, the use of finite group representation theory. The presentation is concrete throughout, with numerous figures, examples (including computer calculations) and exercises, and should appeal to both graduate students and researchers.