When you click the Amazon logo to the left of any citation and purchase the book (or other media) from Amazon.com, MIT OpenCourseWare will receive up to 10% of this purchase and any other purchases you make during that visit. This will not increase the cost of your purchase. Links provided are to the US Amazon site, but you can also support OCW through Amazon sites in other regions. Learn more. |
There are no official prerequisites for this course, though familiarity with combinatorics is assumed. Students should already be familiar with Catalan numbers, Ramsey Theorem, generating functions, Euler's theorem on Eulerian paths, 3-connectivity of convex polytopes in R^3, Chebychev's Inequality, Markov's Inequality, and finite groups.
There are four main textbooks used for this class:
Stanley, R. P. Enumerative Combinatorics. Vol. I and II. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ISBN: 0521553091 (hardback: vol. I); 0521663512 (paperback: vol. I); 0521560691 (hardback: vol. II).
Bollobás, B. Modern Graph Theory (Graduate Texts in Mathematics). New York, NY: Springer-Verlag, 1998. ISBN: 0387984917.
———. Extremal Graph Theory. New York, NY: Dover, 2004. ISBN: 0486435962.
Jukna, S. Extremal Combinatorics. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2000. ISBN: 3540663134.
There are eight problem sets, each weighted equally for your grade. Collaboration is encouraged with a few simple rules. On every problem not more than four people can collaborate. Every student writes her/his own solution. For each problem, all collaborators should be listed.
There are no exams in this course.
The entire grade is based on the eight problem sets.