Jirí Matousek - Böcker

This second edition of Invitation to Discrete Mathematics is a clear and self-contained introduction to discrete mathematics. Aimed mainly at undergraduate and early graduate students of mathematics and computer science, it is written with the goal of stimulating interest in mathematics and an active, problem-solving approach to the presented material. The reader is led to an understanding of the basic principles and methods of actually doing mathematics (and having fun at that). By focussing on a more selective range of topics than many discrete mathematics textbooks, allowing greater depth of treatment using a number of different approaches, the book reflects the conviction of the authors, active and internationally renowned mathematicians, that the most important gain from studying mathematics is the cultivation of clear and logical thinking and habits useful for attacking new problems. More than 400 enclosed exercises with a wide range of difficulty, many of them accompanied by hints for solution, support this approach to teaching. The readers will appreciate the lively and informal style of the text accompanied by more than 200 drawings and diagrams. Specialists in various parts of science with a basic mathematical education wishing to apply discrete mathematics in their field can use the book as a useful source, and even experts in combinatorics may occasionally learn from pointers to research literature or from presentations of recent results. Invitation to Discrete Mathematics should make delightful reading both for beginners and for mathematical professionals.The main topics include: elementary counting problems, asymptotic estimates, partially ordered sets, basic graph theory and graph algorithms, finite projective planes, elementary probability and the probabilistic method, generating functions, Ramsey's theorem, and combinatorial applications of linear algebra. General mathematical notions going beyond the high-school level are thoroughly explained in the introductory chapter. An appendix summarizes the undergraduate algebra needed in some of the more advanced sections of the book.

Discrete geometry investigates combinatorial properties of configurations of geometric objects. To a working mathematician or computer scientist, it offers sophisticated results and techniques of great diversity and it is a foundation for fields such as computational geometry or combinatorial optimization.This book is primarily a textbook introduction to various areas of discrete geometry. In each area, it explains several key results and methods, in an accessible and concrete manner. It also contains more advanced material in separate sections and thus it can serve as a collection of surveys in several narrower subfields. The main topics include: basics on convex sets, convex polytopes, and hyperplane arrangements; combinatorial complexity of geometric configurations; intersection patterns and transversals of convex sets; geometric Ramsey-type results; polyhedral combinatorics and high-dimensional convexity; and lastly, embeddings of finite metric spaces into normed spaces.Jiri Matousek is Professor of Computer Science at Charles University in Prague. His research has contributed to several of the considered areas and to their algorithmic applications. This is his third book.

Discrete geometry investigates combinatorial properties of configurations of geometric objects. To a working mathematician or computer scientist, it offers sophisticated results and techniques of great diversity and it is a foundation for fields such as computational geometry or combinatorial optimization.This book is primarily a textbook introduction to various areas of discrete geometry. In each area, it explains several key results and methods, in an accessible and concrete manner. It also contains more advanced material in separate sections and thus it can serve as a collection of surveys in several narrower subfields. The main topics include: basics on convex sets, convex polytopes, and hyperplane arrangements; combinatorial complexity of geometric configurations; intersection patterns and transversals of convex sets; geometric Ramsey-type results; polyhedral combinatorics and high-dimensional convexity; and lastly, embeddings of finite metric spaces into normed spaces.Jiri Matousek is Professor of Computer Science at Charles University in Prague. His research has contributed to several of the considered areas and to their algorithmic applications. This is his third book.

This volume contains a collection of clever mathematical applications of linear algebra, mainly in combinatorics, geometry, and algorithms. Each chapter covers a single main result with motivation and full proof in at most ten pages and can be read independently of all other chapters (with minor exceptions), assuming only a modest background in linear algebra. The topics include a number of well-known mathematical gems, such as Hamming codes, the matrix-tree theorem, the Lovasz bound on the Shannon capacity, and a counterexample to Borsuk's conjecture, as well as other, perhaps less popular but similarly beautiful results, e.g., fast associativity testing, a lemma of Steinitz on ordering vectors, a monotonicity result for integer partitions, or a bound for set pairs via exterior products. The simpler results in the first part of the book provide ample material to liven up an undergraduate course of linear algebra. The more advanced parts can be used for a graduate course of linear-algebraic methods or for seminar presentations. Table of Contents: Fibonacci numbers, quickly; Fibonacci numbers, the formula; The clubs of Oddtown; Same-size intersections; Error-correcting codes; Odd distances; Are these distances Euclidean?; Packing complete bipartite graphs; Equiangular lines; Where is the triangle?; Checking matrix multiplication; Tiling a rectangle by squares; Three Petersens are not enough; Petersen, Hoffman-Singleton, and maybe 57; Only two distances; Covering a cube minus one vertex; Medium-size intersection is hard to avoid; On the difficulty of reducing the diameter; The end of the small coins; Walking in the yard; Counting spanning trees; In how many ways can a man tile a board?; More bricks--more walls?; Perfect matchings and determinants; Turning a ladder over a finite field; Counting compositions; Is it associative?; The secret agent and umbrella; Shannon capacity of the union: a tale of two fields; Equilateral sets; Cutting cheaply using eigenvectors; Rotating the cube; Set pairs and exterior products; Index. (STML/53)

Mathematics is a concise introduction to six selected areas of 20th century mathematics providing numerous modern mathematical tools used in contemporary research in computer science, engineering, and other fields. The areas are: measure theory, high-dimensional geometry, Fourier analysis, representations of groups, multivariate polynomials, and topology. For each of the areas, the authors introduce basic notions, examples, and results. The presentation is clear and accessible, stressing intuitive understanding, and it includes carefully selected exercises as an integral part. Theory is complemented by applications-some quite surprising-in theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics. The chapters are independent of one another and can be studied in any order. It is assumed that the reader has gone through the basic mathematics courses. Although the book was conceived while the authors were teaching Ph.D. students in theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics, it will be useful for a much wider audience, such as mathematicians specializing in other areas, mathematics students deciding what specialization to pursue, or experts in engineering or other fields.

A number of important results in combinatorics, discrete geometry, and theoretical computer science have been proved using algebraic topology. While the results are quite famous, their proofs are not so widely understood. They are scattered in research papers or outlined in surveys, and they often use topological notions not commonly known among combinatorialists or computer scientists. This book is the first textbook treatment of a significant part of such results. It focuses on so-called equivariant methods, based on the Borsuk-Ulam theorem and its generalizations. The topological tools are intentionally kept on a very elementary level (for example, homology theory and homotopy groups are completely avoided). No prior knowledge of algebraic topology is assumed, only a background in undergraduate mathematics, and the required topological notions and results are gradually explained. At the same time, many substantial combinatorial results are covered, sometimes with some of the most important results, such as Kneser's conjecture, showing them from various points of view.The history of the presented material, references, related results, and more advanced methods are surveyed in separate subsections. The text is accompanied by numerous exercises, of varying difficulty. Many of the exercises actually outline additional results that did not fit in the main text. The book is richly illustrated, and it has a detailed index and an extensive bibliography. This text started with a one-semester graduate course the author taught in fall 1993 in Prague. The transcripts of the lectures by the participants served as a basis of the first version. Some years later, a course partially based on that text was taught by Gunter M. Ziegler in Berlin. The book is based on a thoroughly rewritten version prepared during a pre-doctoral course the author taught at the ETH Zurich in fall 2001. Most of the material was covered in the course: Chapter 1 was assigned as an introductory reading text, and the other chapters were presented in approximately 30 hours of teaching (by 45 minutes), with some omissions throughout and with only a sketchy presentation of the last chapter.

This is an introductory textbook of linear programming, written mainly for students of computer science and mathematics. One of the main focuses is applications of linear programming, both in practice and in theory.

What is the "most uniform" way of distributing n points in the unit square? How big is the "irregularity" necessarily present in any such distribution? Such questions are treated in geometric discrepancy theory. The book is an accessible and lively introduction to this area, with numerous exercises and illustrations. In separate, more specialized parts, it also provides a comprehensive guide to recent research. Including a wide variety of mathematical techniques (from harmonic analysis, combinatorics, algebra etc.) in action on non-trivial examples, the book is suitable for a "special topic" course for early graduates in mathematics and computer science. Besides professional mathematicians, it will be of interest to specialists in fields where a large collection of objects should be "uniformly" represented by a smaller sample (such as high-dimensional numerical integration in computational physics or financial mathematics, efficient divide-and-conquer algorithms in computer science, etc.).

Discrepancy theory is also called the theory of irregularities of distribution. There are subfields closely connected to the original number­ theoretic roots of discrepancy theory, areas related to Ramsey theory and to hypergraphs, and also results supporting eminently practical methods and algorithms for numerical integration and similar tasks.

Semidefinite programs constitute one of the largest classes of optimization problems that can be solved with reasonable efficiency - both in theory and practice. They play a key role in a variety of research areas, such as combinatorial optimization, approximation algorithms, computational complexity, graph theory, geometry, real algebraic geometry and quantum computing. This book is an introduction to selected aspects of semidefinite programming and its use in approximation algorithms. It covers the basics but also a significant amount of recent and more advanced material.  There are many computational problems, such as MAXCUT, for which one cannot reasonably expect to obtain an exact solution efficiently, and in such case, one has to settle for approximate solutions. For MAXCUT and its relatives, exciting recent results suggest that semidefinite programming is probably the ultimate tool. Indeed, assuming the Unique Games Conjecture, a plausible but as yet unproven hypothesis, it was shown that for these problems, known algorithms based on semidefinite programming deliver the best possible approximation ratios among all polynomial-time algorithms. This book follows the “semidefinite side” of these developments, presenting some of the main ideas behind approximation algorithms based on semidefinite programming. It develops the basic theory of semidefinite programming, presents one of the known efficient algorithms in detail, and describes the principles of some others. It also includes applications, focusing on approximation algorithms.

Semidefinite programs constitute one of the largest classes of optimization problems that can be solved with reasonable efficiency - both in theory and practice. They play a key role in a variety of research areas, such as combinatorial optimization, approximation algorithms, computational complexity, graph theory, geometry, real algebraic geometry and quantum computing. This book is an introduction to selected aspects of semidefinite programming and its use in approximation algorithms. It covers the basics but also a significant amount of recent and more advanced material.  There are many computational problems, such as MAXCUT, for which one cannot reasonably expect to obtain an exact solution efficiently, and in such case, one has to settle for approximate solutions. For MAXCUT and its relatives, exciting recent results suggest that semidefinite programming is probably the ultimate tool. Indeed, assuming the Unique Games Conjecture, a plausible but as yet unproven hypothesis, it was shown that for these problems, known algorithms based on semidefinite programming deliver the best possible approximation ratios among all polynomial-time algorithms. This book follows the “semidefinite side” of these developments, presenting some of the main ideas behind approximation algorithms based on semidefinite programming. It develops the basic theory of semidefinite programming, presents one of the known efficient algorithms in detail, and describes the principles of some others. It also includes applications, focusing on approximation algorithms.