Customer Reviews

Foundations of Combinatorics with Applications (Dover Books on Mathematics)

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I have not yet read in this Dover book, of which I have two copies. In 2009 I did read all of the sophomore-level A Short Course in Discrete Mathematics (Dover Books on Computer Science) by the same two authors of Bender and Williamson, and really like their rather computational writing style. They are both emerita at U. California San Diego (UCSD). This 468 page and 6.5"x9.25" book is their first year graduate level and much more comprehensive version of discrete mathematics. Even at its large page size, the font size is still quite small, a real problem with many books reprinted by Dover. I may well start reading this book in 2012.

Since there is no Amazon 'Look Inside' utility for this book, here is the GENERAL TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Contents / Preface / PART I: Counting and Listing / 1 Basic Counting / 2 Functions / 3 Decision Trees / 4 Sieving Methods / PART II: Graphs / 5 Basic Concepts in Graph Theory / 6 A Sampler of Graph Topics / PART III: Recursion / 7 Induction and Recursion / 8 Sorting Theory / 9 Rooted Plane Trees / PART IV: Generating Functions / 10 Ordinary Generating Functions / *11 Generating Function Topics / Appendix A: Induction / Appendix B: Rates of Growth and the Analysis of Algorithms / Appendix C: Basic Probability / Appendix D: Partial Fractions / Solutions to Odd Exercises and Most Appendix Exercises / Index

The reason I called this book a 'catalog' in my title is because, at well over 400 pages of actual subject coverage over that big table of contents above, there isn't a whole lot of combinatorics missing from this book.