The proceedings of an AMS special session on finite geometries and combinatorial designs. Topics range over finite geometry, combinatorial designs, their automorphism groups and related structures.
More than eighty participants from all over the world attended an AMS Special Session on Finite Geometries and Combinatorial Designs held in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the fall of 1987. This volume contains the proceedings of that Special Session, in addition to several invited papers. Employing state-of-the-art combinatorial and geometric methods, the papers show significant advances in this area. Topics range over finite geometry, combinatorial designs, their automorphism groups, and related structures. Requiring graduate-level background, this book is intended primarily for researchers in finite geometries and combinatorial designs. However, the interested nonspecialist will find that the book provides an excellent overview of current activity in these areas.
This book collects some surveys on current trends in discrete mathematics and discrete geometry. The areas covered include: graph representations, structural graphs theory, extremal graph theory, Ramsey theory and constrained satisfaction problems.
Computational geometry as an area of research in its own right emerged in the early seventies of this century. Right from the beginning, it was obvious that strong connections of various kinds exist to questions studied in the considerably older field of combinatorial geometry. For example, the combinatorial structure of a geometric problem usually decides which algorithmic method solves the problem most efficiently. Furthermore, the analysis of an algorithm often requires a great deal of combinatorial knowledge. As it turns out, however, the connection between the two research areas commonly referred to as computa tional geometry and combinatorial geometry is not as lop-sided as it appears. Indeed, the interest in computational issues in geometry gives a new and con structive direction to the combinatorial study of geometry. It is the intention of this book to demonstrate that computational and com binatorial investigations in geometry are doomed to profit from each other. To reach this goal, I designed this book to consist of three parts, acorn binatorial part, a computational part, and one that presents applications of the results of the first two parts. The choice of the topics covered in this book was guided by my attempt to describe the most fundamental algorithms in computational geometry that have an interesting combinatorial structure. In this early stage geometric transforms played an important role as they reveal connections between seemingly unrelated problems and thus help to structure the field.
This undergraduate textbook is suitable for introductory classes in combinatorics and related topics. The book covers a wide range of both pure and applied combinatorics, beginning with the very basics of enumeration and then going on to Latin squares, graphs and designs. The latter topic is closely related to finite geometry, which is developed in parallel. Applications to probability theory, algebra, coding theory, cryptology and combinatorial game theory comprise the later chapters. Throughout the book, examples and exercises illustrate the material, and the interrelations between the various topics is emphasized. Readers looking to take first steps toward the study of combinatorics, finite geometry, design theory, coding theory, or cryptology will find this book valuable. Essentially self-contained, there are very few prerequisites aside from some mathematical maturity, and the little algebra required is covered in the text. The book is also a valuable resource for anyone interested in discrete mathematics as it ties together a wide variety of topics.
Continuing in the bestselling, informative tradition of the first edition, the Handbook of Combinatorial Designs, Second Edition remains the only resource to contain all of the most important results and tables in the field of combinatorial design. This handbook covers the constructions, properties, and applications of designs as well as existence