Combinatorics: Ancient and Modern
Robin Wilson and John J. Watkins
Abstract
The history of mathematics is a well-studied and vibrant area of research, with books and scholarly articles published on various aspects of the subject. Yet, the history of combinatorics seems to have been largely overlooked. This book goes some way to redress this and serves two main purposes: it constitutes the first book-length survey of the history of combinatorics, and it assembles, for the first time in a single source, researches on the history of combinatorics that would otherwise be inaccessible to the general reader. Individual chapters have been contributed by sixteen experts. The ... More
The history of mathematics is a well-studied and vibrant area of research, with books and scholarly articles published on various aspects of the subject. Yet, the history of combinatorics seems to have been largely overlooked. This book goes some way to redress this and serves two main purposes: it constitutes the first book-length survey of the history of combinatorics, and it assembles, for the first time in a single source, researches on the history of combinatorics that would otherwise be inaccessible to the general reader. Individual chapters have been contributed by sixteen experts. The book opens with an introduction to two thousand years of combinatorics. This is followed by seven chapters on early combinatorics, leading from Indian and Chinese writings on permutations to late-Renaissance publications on the arithmetical triangle. The next seven chapters trace the subsequent story, from Euler’s contributions to such wide-ranging topics as partitions, polyhedra, and latin squares to the 20th-century advances in combinatorial set theory, enumeration, and graph theory. The book concludes with some combinatorial reflections.
Keywords:
history of mathematics,
combinatorics,
Indian combinatorics,
Chinese combinatorics,
arithmetical triangle,
partitions,
polyhedra,
latin squares,
Euler,
combinatorial set theory,
enumeration,
graph theory
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2013 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199656592 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2013 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199656592.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Robin Wilson, editor
Emeritus Professor of Pure Mathematics, The Open University, UK and Lecturer in Mathematics, Pembroke College, Oxford University
John J. Watkins, editor
Emeritus Professor of Mathematics, Colorado College
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