Издательство Elsevier, 1995, -1120 pp.
Combinatorics belongs to those areas of mathematics having experienced a most impressive growth in recent years. This growth has been fuelled in large part by the increasing importance of computers, the needs of computer science and demands from applications where discrete models play more and more important roles. But also more classical branches of mathematics have come to recognize that combinatorial structures are essential components of many mathematical theories.
Despite the dynamic state of this development, we feel that the time is ripe for summarizing the current status of the field and for surveying those major results that in our opinion will be of long-term importance. We approached leading experts in all areas of combinatorics to write chapters for this Handbook. The response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic and the result is what you see here.
The intention of the Handbook is to provide the working mathematician or computer scientist with a good overview of basic methods and paradigms, as well as important results and current issues and trends across the broad spectrum of com- combinatorics. However, our hope is that even specialists can benefit from reading this Handbook, by leaing a leading expert's coherent and individual view of the topic.
As the reader will notice by looking at the table of contents, we have structured the Handbook into five sections: Structures, Aspects, Methods, Applications, and Horizons. We feel that viewing the whole field from different perspectives and taking different cross-sections will help to understand the underlying framework of the subject and to see the interrelationships more clearly. As a consequence of this approach, a number of the fundamental results occur in more than one chap- chapter. We believe that this is an asset rather than a shortcoming, since it illustrates different viewpoints and interpretations of the" results.
We thank the authors not only for writing the chapters but also for many helpful suggestions on the organization of the book and the presentation of the material. Many colleagues have contributed to the Handbook by reading the initial versions of the chapters and by making proposals with respect to the inclusion of topics and results as well as the structuring of the chapters. We are grateful for the significant help we received.
Even though this Handbook is quite voluminous, it was inevitable that some areas of combinatorics had to be left out or were not covered in the depth they deserved. Nevertheless, we believe that the Handbook of Combinatorics presents a comprehensive and accessible view of the present state of the field and that it will prove to be of lasting value.
Volume I.
Structures.
Graphs.
Basic Graph Theory: Paths and Circuits.
Connectivity and Network Flows.
Matchings and Extensions.
Colouring, Stable Sets and Perfect Graphs.
Appendix to Chapter 4: Nowhere-Zero Flows.
Embeddings and Minors.
Random Graphs.
Finite Sets and Relations.
Hypergraphs.
ally Ordered Sets.
Matroids.
Matroids: Fundamental Concepts.
Matroid Minors.
Matroid Optimization and Algorithms.
Symmetric Structures.
Permutation Groups.
Finite Geometries.
Block Designs.
Association Schemes.
Codes.
Combinatorial Structures in Geometry and Number Theory.
Extremal Problems in Combinatorial Geometry.
Convex Polytopes and Related Complexes.
Point Lattices.
Combinatorial Number Theory.
Combinatorics belongs to those areas of mathematics having experienced a most impressive growth in recent years. This growth has been fuelled in large part by the increasing importance of computers, the needs of computer science and demands from applications where discrete models play more and more important roles. But also more classical branches of mathematics have come to recognize that combinatorial structures are essential components of many mathematical theories.
Despite the dynamic state of this development, we feel that the time is ripe for summarizing the current status of the field and for surveying those major results that in our opinion will be of long-term importance. We approached leading experts in all areas of combinatorics to write chapters for this Handbook. The response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic and the result is what you see here.
The intention of the Handbook is to provide the working mathematician or computer scientist with a good overview of basic methods and paradigms, as well as important results and current issues and trends across the broad spectrum of com- combinatorics. However, our hope is that even specialists can benefit from reading this Handbook, by leaing a leading expert's coherent and individual view of the topic.
As the reader will notice by looking at the table of contents, we have structured the Handbook into five sections: Structures, Aspects, Methods, Applications, and Horizons. We feel that viewing the whole field from different perspectives and taking different cross-sections will help to understand the underlying framework of the subject and to see the interrelationships more clearly. As a consequence of this approach, a number of the fundamental results occur in more than one chap- chapter. We believe that this is an asset rather than a shortcoming, since it illustrates different viewpoints and interpretations of the" results.
We thank the authors not only for writing the chapters but also for many helpful suggestions on the organization of the book and the presentation of the material. Many colleagues have contributed to the Handbook by reading the initial versions of the chapters and by making proposals with respect to the inclusion of topics and results as well as the structuring of the chapters. We are grateful for the significant help we received.
Even though this Handbook is quite voluminous, it was inevitable that some areas of combinatorics had to be left out or were not covered in the depth they deserved. Nevertheless, we believe that the Handbook of Combinatorics presents a comprehensive and accessible view of the present state of the field and that it will prove to be of lasting value.
Volume I.
Structures.
Graphs.
Basic Graph Theory: Paths and Circuits.
Connectivity and Network Flows.
Matchings and Extensions.
Colouring, Stable Sets and Perfect Graphs.
Appendix to Chapter 4: Nowhere-Zero Flows.
Embeddings and Minors.
Random Graphs.
Finite Sets and Relations.
Hypergraphs.
ally Ordered Sets.
Matroids.
Matroids: Fundamental Concepts.
Matroid Minors.
Matroid Optimization and Algorithms.
Symmetric Structures.
Permutation Groups.
Finite Geometries.
Block Designs.
Association Schemes.
Codes.
Combinatorial Structures in Geometry and Number Theory.
Extremal Problems in Combinatorial Geometry.
Convex Polytopes and Related Complexes.
Point Lattices.
Combinatorial Number Theory.