An Invitation to Combinatorics Cambridge Mathematical Textbooks Series

Active student engagement is key to this classroom-tested combinatorics text, boasting 1200+ carefully designed problems, ten mini-projects, section warm-up problems, and chapter opening problems. The author ? an award-winning teacher ? writes in a conversational style, keeping the reader in mind on every page. Students will stay motivated through glimpses into current research trends and open problems as well as the history and global origins of the subject. All essential topics are covered, including Ramsey theory, enumerative combinatorics including Stirling numbers, partitions of integers, the inclusion-exclusion principle, generating functions, introductory graph theory, and partially ordered sets. Some significant results are presented as sets of guided problems, leading readers to discover them on their own. More than 140 problems have complete solutions and over 250 have hints in the back, making this book ideal for self-study. Ideal for a one semester upper undergraduate course, prerequisites include the calculus sequence and familiarity with proofs.

Preface; Introduction; 1. Induction and Recurrence Relations; 2. The Pigeonhole Principle and Ramsey Theory; 3. Counting, Probability, Balls and Boxes; 4. Permutations and Combinations; 5. Binomial and Multinomial Coefficients; 6. Stirling Numbers; 7. Integer Partitions; 8. The Inclusion-Exclusion Principle; 9. Generating Functions; 10. Graph Theory; 11. Posets, Matchings, and Boolean Lattices; Appendices; Bibliography; Index.

Shahriar Shahriari is Professor of Mathematics at Pomona College. He has over fifty publications in mathematics including two books: Approximately Calculus (AMS 2006) and Algebra in Action: A Course in Groups, Rings, and Fields (AMS 2017). His book Approximately Calculus was chosen as an American Library Association's Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2007, and he won the Mathematical Association of America's Carl B. Allendoerfer Award for expository writing in 1998. Shahriari was awarded the Mathematical Association of America's Haimo National Teaching award in 2015, the Southern California-Nevada Section of the Mathematics Association of America's Teaching Award in 2014, and Pomona College's collegewide student-voted Wig Distinguished Teacher award five different times.