Applied Combinatorics

This is a revision of a one-semester survey of combinatorial analysis and graph theory, designed for mathematics and computer science majors. Three principal aspects of combinatorial reasoning are emphasized in this book: the systematic analysis of different possibilities, the exploration of the logical structure of a problem, and ingenuity. Keeping theory to a minimum, it uses numerical examples to demonstrate the combinatorial reasoning involved in computer science, operations research, and finite probability. This edition gives more attention to computer science's use of combinatorics. Includes a new chapter on topics in theoretical computer science, a new section on recursive programs, an enlarged discussion of algorithms to generate combinatorial sets, and additional programming exercises.