A few decades ago it might have been said that combinatorics is to mathematics roughly what irritable bowel syndrome is to gastroenterology - a way to classify poorly-understood problems, and some standard remedies. Great progress has been made since 1960.
This page is complementary to the list of graph theory topics: graph theory being the part of combinatorial mathematics that is most like a separate discipline. In general, combinatorics is as much about problem solving as theory building.
Since combinatorial mathematics is effectively the environment for the study of data structures in computer science, there are very many topics that arise there. The same could be said for other fields, such as error-correcting codes, bioinformatics.
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2 Problem solving as an art 3 Some general theories 4 Topics 5 Letters 6 Data structure concepts 7 People |
To begin with, some general principles:
General combinatorial principles and methods
Problem solving as an art
Some general theories
Topics
Letters
Data structure concepts
People