Appropriate for one- or two-semester, junior- to senior-level combinatorics courses. This trusted best-seller covers the key combinatorial ideas--including the pigeon-hole principle, counting techniques, permutations and combinations, Polya counting, binomial coefficients, inclusion-exclusion principle, generating functions and recurrence relations, combinatortial structures (matchings, designs, graphs), and flows in networks. The Fifth Edition incorporates feedback from users to the exposition throughout and adds a wealth of new exercises.

This second volume of a two-volume basic introduction to enumerative combinatorics covers the composition of generating functions, trees, algebraic generating functions, D-finite generating functions, noncommutative generating functions, and symmetric functions. The chapter on symmetric functions provides the only available treatment of this subject suitable for an introductory graduate course on combinatorics, and includes the important Robinson-Schensted-Knuth algorithm. Also covered are connections between symmetric functions and representation theory. An appendix by Sergey Fomin covers some deeper aspects of symmetric function theory, including jeu de taquin and the Littlewood-Richardson rule. As in Volume 1, the exercises play a vital role in developing the material. There are over 250 exercises, all with solutions or references to solutions, many of which concern previously unpublished results. Graduate students and research mathematicians who wish to apply combinatorics to their work will find this an authoritative reference.

《组合数学》(原书第4版)侧重于组合数学的概念和思想，包括鸽巢原理、计数技术、排列组合、Polya计数法、二项式系数、容斥原理、生成函数和递推关系以及组合结构(匹配、实验设计、图)等，深入浅出地表达了作者对该领域全面和深刻的理解，介绍了历史上源于数学游戏和娱乐的大量实例，其中对Polya计数、Burnside定理等的完美处理使得不熟悉群论的学生也能够读懂。除包含第3版中的内容外，本版又进行了更新，增加了莫比乌斯反演(作为容斥原理的推广)、格路径、Schroder数等内容。此外，各章均包含大量练习题，并在书末给出了参考答案与提示。