Syllabus

Course Meeting Times

Lectures: Three sessions / week, 1 hour / session

Course Outline

  • Extremal Graph Theory
  • Traditional Graph Theory
  • Set Combinatorics
  • Additive Combinatorics
  • Enumerative Combinatorics
  • Geometric Combinatorics

Prerequisites

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.

Main Textbook

There are four main textbooks used for this class:

Buy at Amazon Stanley, R. P. Enumerative Combinatorics. Vol. I and II. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ISBN: 0521553091 (hardback: vol. I); Buy at Amazon 0521663512 (paperback: vol. I); Buy at Amazon 0521560691 (hardback: vol. II).

Buy at Amazon Bollobás, B. Modern Graph Theory (Graduate Texts in Mathematics). New York, NY: Springer-Verlag, 1998. ISBN: 0387984917.

Buy at Amazon ———. Extremal Graph Theory. New York, NY: Dover, 2004. ISBN: 0486435962.

Buy at Amazon Jukna, S. Extremal Combinatorics. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2000. ISBN: 3540663134.

Problem Sets

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.

Exams

There are no exams in this course.

Grading

The entire grade is based on the eight problem sets.