Is Hitler bigger than Napoleon? Washington bigger than Lincoln? Picasso bigger than Einstein? Quantitative analysts are rapidly finding homes in social and cultural domains, from finance to politics. What about history? In this fascinating book, Steve Skiena and Charles Ward bring quantitative analysis to bear on ranking and comparing historical reputations. They evaluate each person by aggregating the traces of millions of opinions, just as Google ranks webpages. The book includes a technical discussion for readers interested in the details of the methods, but no mathematical or computational background is necessary to understand the rankings or conclusions. Along the way, the authors present the rankings of more than one thousand of history's most significant people in science, politics, entertainment, and all areas of human endeavor. Anyone interested in history or biography can see where their favorite figures place in the grand scheme of things.

This book was first published in 2003. Combinatorica, an extension to the popular computer algebra system Mathematica (R), is the most comprehensive software available for teaching and research applications of discrete mathematics, particularly combinatorics and graph theory. This book is the definitive reference/user's guide to Combinatorica, with examples of all 450 Combinatorica functions in action, along with the associated mathematical and algorithmic theory. The authors cover classical and advanced topics on the most important combinatorial objects: permutations, subsets, partitions, and Young tableaux, as well as all important areas of graph theory: graph construction operations, invariants, embeddings, and algorithmic graph theory. In addition to being a research tool, Combinatorica makes discrete mathematics accessible in new and exciting ways to a wide variety of people, by encouraging computational experimentation and visualization. The book contains no formal proofs, but enough discussion to understand and appreciate all the algorithms and theorems it contains.