Combinatorics: Ancient & Modern

by Wilson, Robin; Watkins, John J.; Graham, Ronald

• ISBN13: 9780199656592
• ISBN10: 0199656592
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-08-24
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Author Biography

Robin Wilson is an Emeritus Professor of Pure Mathematics at the Open University, Emeritus Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, London, and a former Fellow of Keble College, Oxford. He is currently President of the British Society for the History of Mathematics. He has written and edited many books on graph theory, including Introduction to Graph Theory and Four Colours Suffice, and on the history of mathematics, including Lewis Carroll in Numberland. He is involved with the popularization and communication of mathematics and its history, and was awarded a Polya prize by the Mathematical Association of America for 'outstanding expository writing'.


John J. Watkins is an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Colorado College, USA. He received his doctorate from the University of Kansas, specializing in commutative ring theory. His main research interest, however, has been in graph theory and he has published mainly in this area, including many papers with undergraduates as co-authors. He has written several books, including Graphs: An Introductory Approach, Across the Board: The Mathematics of Chessboard Problems, and Topics in Commutative Ring Theory, and has recently finished his latest book, Elementary Number Theory. Colorado College presented John Watkins with the 2005 Boettcher Award for Faculty Excellence.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION
Two Thousand Years of Combinatorics, DONALD E. KNUTH
PART I: ANCIENT COMBINATORICS
1. Indian Combinatorics, TAKANORI KUSUBA and KIM PLOFKER
2. China, ANDREA BREARD
3. Islamic Combinatorics, AHMED DJEBBAR
4. Jewish Combinatorics, VICTOR J. KATZ
5. Renaissance Combinatorics, EBERHARD KNOBLOCH
6. The Origins of Modern Combinatorics, EBERHARD KNOBLOCH
7. The Arithmetical Triangle, A. W. F. EDWARDS
PART II: MODERN COMBINATORICS
8. Early Graph Theory, ROBIN WILSON
9. Partitions, GEORGE E. ANDREWS
10. Block Designs, NORMAN BIGGS and ROBIN WILSON
11. Latin Squares, LARS DOVLING ANDERSEN
12. Enumeration (18th-20th Centuries), E. KEITH LLOYD
13. Combinatorial Set Theory, IAN ANDERSON
14. Modern Graph Theory, LOWELL BEINEKE and ROBIN WILSON
AFTERMATH
A Personal View of Combinatroics, PETER J. CAMERON