Introductory Combinatorics

by Kenneth P. Bogart

Introductory, Combinatorics, Third Edition is designed for introductory courses in combinatorics, or more generally, discrete mathematics. The author, Kenneth Bogart, has chosen core material of value to students in a wide variety of disciplines: mathematics, computer science, statistics, operations research, physical sciences, and behavioral sciences. The rapid growth in the breadth and depth of the field of combinatorics in the last several decades, first in graph theory and designs and more recently in enumeration and ordered sets, has led to a recognition of combinatorics as a field with which the aspiring mathematician should become familiar. This long-overdue new edition of a popular set presents a broad comprehensive survey of modern combinatorics which is important to the various scientific fields of study.

Genres: Mathematics

Hardcover

First published December 1, 1983

Reviews

[Matthew MacLennan]

Broad scope treatise of introductory combinatorics. Over 600 pages are written with theorems and proofs and with lots of exercises and answers to every second question at the back. Originally, I obtained the book to learn something about functions and bijection and the book covers it, but not in one snap: jectiveness and other aspects are covered throughout, which is probably a function of it being used for teaching. There is also no mention of "fuzziness" if that's what you're looking for (which I was)--likely because it is an introductory text. The book is made to be used in courses and has an eye for that use.

Don't let the LaTeX style font intimidate you!

[David Shuster]

Overall good. Very nice introductory exercises to get the hang of things. Decent intuitive explanations, though sometimes excessively wordy. A few downsides:
Fair number of typos
Some of it would be imo pretty hard to follow without more background, and I'm always a little judgemental of books that half-pretend background without actually giving a rigorous background to the matter