Introductory Combinatorics

by Kenneth P. Bogart

Focusing on the core material of value to students in a wide variety of fields, this book presents a broad comprehensive survey of modern combinatorics at an introductory level. The author begins with an introduction of concepts fundamental to all branches of combinatorics in the context of combinatorial enumeration. Chapter 2 is devoted to enumeration problems that involve counting the number of equivalence classes of an equivalence relation. Chapter 3 discusses somewhat less direct methods of enumeration, the principle of inclusion and exclusion and generating functions. The remainder of the book is devoted to a study of combinatorial structures.

Genres: Mathematics

654 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1983

Reviews

[Matthew MacLennan · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 · Rating 3 out of 5]

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