Customer Reviews

Erdos on Graphs : His Legacy of Unsolved Problems

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What is incredible about this book is not that there are over one hundred pages of unsolved problems posed all or in part by Paul Erdos. The amazing thing is that the word graphs could be replaced by several other mathematical words or phrases and a similar book could be written. Erdos was an expert in so many areas of mathematics and perhaps his greatest ability was in putting forward just the right questions to just the right people. There is very little explanation of the problem proposals, the authors rely on a great deal of the listing of references to fill in the details. Therefore, anyone interested in exploring the problems in greater detail should be prepared to spend some time and effort in tracking down the relevant articles. Fortunately, the authors themselves did a great deal of that, as there are complete references for every problem that appears.
The range of problems is a demonstration of the depth of his understanding of graph theory, and also a demonstration of how little is still unresolved. I put forward no pretense to understanding any more than a few of the problems in this book. However, that did not alter my interest in the problems, as I was able to understand the fundamentals of almost all of them. Reading this book is one of the most educational experiences that I have had in the past year and I encourage all mathematicians at the level of slightest interest in graph theory and above to read it.

Published in Journal of Recreational Mathematics, reprinted with permission.

I got a book by Ron Graham and Fan Chung.
It is amazingly bad.
It is a book on graphs without one graph diagram
or graph matrix.
I buy these books for learning.
I'm left with not being able to give an honest review
because it would be politically suicide in Mathematics to
cross Ron Graham who has been president of both Mathematics societies.
The book is a very badly written one, too,
with a few mostly ancient ( from as far back as the 1930's )
problems in graph theory.
I have to go to MathWorld to get an idea of what the graphs might look like!

Since it appears that the graphs are the dog that wags the matrices,
I thought I might get further with some better understanding.
It appears this book is the wrong place to get it.

One reason as I see it that Fan Chung and Ron Graham
don't answer emails much is that they really aren't all that nice, good or smart:
their "meal ticket" was Erdos and he is dead now.
That's not a "pretty" conclusion or one I wanted, you know?
Tattle tale stories about the great man aren't going to save this one.

Even for me this may take years to get my money's worth out of.
I looked at the review by Charles Ashbacher and I had to set the record straight.
He is a friend of a friend who is also into integer sequences.
Somebody has to be honest here.