Robin Wilson and John J. Watkins (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199656592
- eISBN:
- 9780191748059
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199656592.001.0001
- Subject:
- Mathematics, Combinatorics / Graph Theory / Discrete Mathematics, History of Mathematics
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
