Combinatorial enumeration is a readily accessible subject full of easily stated, but sometimes tantalizingly difficult problems. This book leads the reader in a leisurely way from the basic notions to a variety of topics, ranging from algebra to statistical physics. Its aim is to introduce the student to a fascinating field, and to be a source of information for the professional mathematician who wants to learn more about the subject. The book is organized in three parts: Basics, Methods, and Topics. There are 666 exercises, and as a special feature every chapter ends with a highlight, discussing a particularly beautiful or famous result.

Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Autorentext

Biography of Martin Aigner Martin Aigner received his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1965 from the University of Vienna. He then spent five years in the United States, the last two at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he was introduced to the combinatorial world (which he has never left since) by G. C. Rota and the late R. C. Bose. After extensive travels he returned to Europe and spent three years at the University of Tübingen with a senior fellowship of the German Science Foundation. Since 1974 he has been a Professor of Mathematics at the Free University of Berlin. Martin Aigner has published in various fields of combinatorics and graph theory and is the author of several monographs on discrete mathematics, graph theory and the theory of search.

Inhalt
Basics.- Fundamental Coefficients.- Formal Series and Infinite Matrices.- Methods.- Generating Functions.- Hypergeometric Summation.- Sieve Methods.- Enumeration of Patterns.- Topics.- The Catalan Connection.- Symmetric Functions.- Counting Polynomials.- Models from Statistical Physics.