This volume contains nine survey articles based on the invited lectures given at the 24th British Combinatorial Conference, held at Royal Holloway, University of London in July 2013. This biennial conference is a well-established international event, with speakers from around the world. The volume provides an up-to-date overview of current research in several areas of combinatorics, including graph theory, matroid theory and automatic counting, as well as connections to coding theory and B...

What do proteins and pop-up cards have in common? How is opening a grocery bag different from opening a gift box? How can you cut out the letters for a whole word all at once with one straight scissors cut? How many ways are there to flatten a cube? With the help of 200 colour figures, author Joseph O'Rourke explains these fascinating folding problems starting from high school algebra and geometry and introducing more advanced concepts in tangible contexts as they arise. He shows how varia...

In a surprising sequence of developments, the longest increasing subsequence problem, originally mentioned as merely a curious example in a 1961 paper, has proven to have deep connections to many seemingly unrelated branches of mathematics, such as random permutations, random matrices, Young tableaux, and the corner growth model. The detailed and playful study of these connections makes this book suitable as a starting point for a wider exploration of elegant mathematical ideas that are of...

Matroid theory is a vibrant area of research that provides a unified way to understand graph theory, linear algebra and combinatorics via finite geometry. This book provides the first comprehensive introduction to the field which will appeal to undergraduate students and to any mathematician interested in the geometric approach to matroids. Written in a friendly, fun-to-read style and developed from the authors' own undergraduate courses, the book is ideal for students. Beginning with a ba...

This new edition of Introduction to Lattices and Order presents a radical reorganization and updating, though its primary aim is unchanged. The explosive development of theoretical computer science in recent years has, in particular, influenced the book's evolution: a fresh treatment of fixpoints testifies to this and Galois connections now feature prominently. An early presentation of concept analysis gives both a concrete foundation for the subsequent theory of complete lattices and a gl...

Randomized algorithms have become a central part of the algorithms curriculum, based on their increasingly widespread use in modern applications. This book presents a coherent and unified treatment of probabilistic techniques for obtaining high probability estimates on the performance of randomized algorithms. It covers the basic toolkit from the Chernoff–Hoeffding bounds to more sophisticated techniques like martingales and isoperimetric inequalities, as well as some recent developments l...

From social networks such as Facebook, the World Wide Web and the Internet, to the complex interactions between proteins in the cells of our bodies, we constantly face the challenge of understanding the structure and development of networks. The theory of random graphs provides a framework for this understanding, and in this book the authors give a gentle introduction to the basic tools for understanding and applying the theory. Part I includes sufficient material, including exercises, for...

Chromatic graph theory is a thriving area that uses various ideas of 'colouring' (of vertices, edges, and so on) to explore aspects of graph theory. It has links with other areas of mathematics, including topology, algebra and geometry, and is increasingly used in such areas as computer networks, where colouring algorithms form an important feature. While other books cover portions of the material, no other title has such a wide scope as this one, in which acknowledged international expert...

Richard Stanley's two-volume basic introduction to enumerative combinatorics has become the standard guide to the topic for students and experts alike. This thoroughly revised second edition of Volume 1 includes ten new sections and more than 300 new exercises, most with solutions, reflecting numerous new developments since the publication of the first edition in 1986. The author brings the coverage up to date and includes a wide variety of additional applications and examples, as well as ...

Aimed at graduate students and researchers, this fascinating text provides a comprehensive study of the Erdős–Ko–Rado Theorem, with a focus on algebraic methods. The authors begin by discussing well-known proofs of the EKR bound for intersecting families. The natural generalization of the EKR Theorem holds for many different objects that have a notion of intersection, and the bulk of this book focuses on algebraic proofs that can be applied to these different objects. The authors introduce...

The geometry of power exponents includes the Newton polyhedron, normal cones of its faces, power and logarithmic transformations. On the basis of the geometry universal algorithms for simplifications of systems of nonlinear equations (algebraic, ordinary differential and partial differential) were developed.The algorithms form a new calculus which allows to make local and asymptotical analysis of solutions to those systems.The efficiency of the calculus is demonstrated with regard to sever...

This book focuses on the major applications of martingales to the geometry of Banach spaces, and a substantial discussion of harmonic analysis in Banach space valued Hardy spaces is also presented. It covers exciting links between super-reflexivity and some metric spaces related to computer science, as well as an outline of the recently developed theory of non-commutative martingales, which has natural connections with quantum physics and quantum information theory. Requiring few prerequis...