An Invitation to Combinatorics

Book Details:

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

• Author: Shahriari, Shahriar

• Language: English

• ISBN: 9781108476546

• Pages: 613

• Cover: Hardcover

• Dimensions: 9.9 x 7.8 x 1.3 inches

About The Book:

Combinatorics: A Problem-Oriented Approach by Shahriar Shahriari is a comprehensive, student-focused text designed for upper undergraduate students studying combinatorics. This classroom-tested book emphasizes active student engagement, featuring over 1200 carefully crafted problems, ten mini-projects, and a wealth of problems at the start of each chapter to warm up students for the material ahead. The author’s conversational writing style, coupled with his award-winning teaching approach, ensures that the content is engaging and accessible to students.

Covering a broad range of essential topics, including Ramsey theory, enumerative combinatorics (such as Stirling numbers), partitions of integers, the inclusion-exclusion principle, generating functions, introductory graph theory, and partially ordered sets, the book provides an in-depth understanding of combinatorics. Key results are presented as sets of guided problems, encouraging students to derive the results on their own, fostering both learning and discovery.

The book also provides 140 fully solved problems and over 250 with hints, making it a perfect resource for self-study. The text introduces current research trends, open problems, and the history of combinatorics, giving students a deeper connection to the subject’s development and global context.

Ideal for a one-semester upper undergraduate course, Combinatorics: A Problem-Oriented Approach assumes a background in calculus and familiarity with proofs. This engaging and comprehensive resource is a must-have for students eager to explore the fascinating world of combinatorics in a structured and interactive way.