This book is the result of a 25-year-old project and comprises a collection of more than 500 attractive open problems in the field. The largely self-contained chapters provide a broad overview of discrete geometry, along with historical details and the most important partial results related to these problems. This book is intended as a source book for both professional mathematicians and graduate students who love beautiful mathematical questions, are willing to spend sleepless nights thinking about them, and who would like to get involved in mathematical research.
A complete, self-contained introduction to a powerful and resurgingmathematical discipline . Combinatorial Geometry presents andexplains with complete proofs some of the most important resultsand methods of this relatively young mathematical discipline,started by Minkowski, Fejes Toth, Rogers, and Erd???s. Nearly halfthe results presented in this book were discovered over the pasttwenty years, and most have never before appeared in any monograph.Combinatorial Geometry will be of particular interest tomathematicians, computer scientists, physicists, and materialsscientists interested in computational geometry, robotics, sceneanalysis, and computer-aided design. It is also a superb textbook,complete with end-of-chapter problems and hints to their solutionsthat help students clarify their understanding and test theirmastery of the material. Topics covered include: * Geometric number theory * Packing and covering with congruent convex disks * Extremal graph and hypergraph theory * Distribution of distances among finitely many points * Epsilon-nets and Vapnik--Chervonenkis dimension * Geometric graph theory * Geometric discrepancy theory * And much more
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.
Among the intuitively appealing aspects of graph theory is its close connection to drawings and geometry. The development of computer technology has become a source of motivation to reconsider these connections, in particular geometric graphs are emerging as a new subfield of graph theory. Arrangements of points and lines are the objects for many challenging problems and surprising solutions in combinatorial geometry. The book is a collection of beautiful and partly very recent results from the intersection of geometry, graph theory and combinatorics.
This book presents methods of solving problems in three areas of elementary combinatorial mathematics: classical combinatorics, combinatorial arithmetic, and combinatorial geometry. Brief theoretical discussions are immediately followed by carefully worked-out examples of increasing degrees of difficulty and by exercises that range from routine to rather challenging. The book features approximately 310 examples and 650 exercises.
Historically, there is a close connection between geometry and optImization. This is illustrated by methods like the gradient method and the simplex method, which are associated with clear geometric pictures. In combinatorial optimization, however, many of the strongest and most frequently used algorithms are based on the discrete structure of the problems: the greedy algorithm, shortest path and alternating path methods, branch-and-bound, etc. In the last several years geometric methods, in particular polyhedral combinatorics, have played a more and more profound role in combinatorial optimization as well. Our book discusses two recent geometric algorithms that have turned out to have particularly interesting consequences in combinatorial optimization, at least from a theoretical point of view. These algorithms are able to utilize the rich body of results in polyhedral combinatorics. The first of these algorithms is the ellipsoid method, developed for nonlinear programming by N. Z. Shor, D. B. Yudin, and A. S. NemirovskiI. It was a great surprise when L. G. Khachiyan showed that this method can be adapted to solve linear programs in polynomial time, thus solving an important open theoretical problem. While the ellipsoid method has not proved to be competitive with the simplex method in practice, it does have some features which make it particularly suited for the purposes of combinatorial optimization. The second algorithm we discuss finds its roots in the classical "geometry of numbers", developed by Minkowski. This method has had traditionally deep applications in number theory, in particular in diophantine approximation.
A Survey of Combinatorial Theory covers the papers presented at the International Symposium on Combinatorial Mathematics and its Applications, held at Colorado State University (CSU), Fort Collins, Colorado on September 9-11, 1971. The book focuses on the principles, operations, and approaches involved in combinatorial theory, including the Bose-Nelson sorting problem, Golay code, and Galois geometries. The selection first ponders on classical and modern topics in finite geometrical structures; balanced hypergraphs and applications to graph theory; and strongly regular graph derived from the perfect ternary Golay code. Discussions focus on perfect ternary Golay code, finite projective and affine planes, Galois geometries, and other geometric structures. The book then examines the characterization problems of combinatorial graph theory, line-minimal graphs with cyclic group, circle geometry in higher dimensions, and Cayley diagrams and regular complex polygons. The text discusses combinatorial problems in finite Abelian groups, dissection graphs of planar point sets, combinatorial problems and results in fractional replication, Bose-Nelson sorting problem, and some combinatorial aspects of coding theory. The text also reviews the enumerative theory of planar maps, balanced arrays and orthogonal arrays, existence of resolvable block designs, and combinatorial problems in communication networks. The selection is a valuable source of information for mathematicians and researchers interested in the combinatorial theory.
Geometric combinatorics describes a wide area of mathematics that is primarily the study of geometric objects and their combinatorial structure. This text is a compilation of expository articles at the interface between combinatorics and geometry.
"Based on a lecture series given by the authors at a satellite meeting of the 2006 International Congress of Mathematicians and on many articles written by them and their collaborators, this volume provides a comprehensive up-to-date survey of several core areas of combinatorial geometry. It describes the beginnings of the subject, going back to the nineteenth century (if not to Euclid), and explains why counting incidences and estimating the combinatorial complexity of various arrangements of geometric objects became the theoretical backbone of computational geometry in the 1980s and 1990s. The combinatorial techniques outlined in this book have found applications in many areas of computer science from graph drawing through hidden surface removal and motion planning to frequency allocation in cellular networks. "Combinatorial Geometry and Its Algorithmic Applications" is intended as a source book for professional mathematicians and computer scientists as well as for graduate students interested in combinatorics and geometry. Most chapters start with an attractive, simply formulated, but often difficult and only partially answered mathematical question, and describes the most efficient techniques developed for its solution. The text includes many challenging open problems, figures, and an extensive bibliography."--BOOK JACKET.
