This is the first book devoted to the systematic study of sparse graphs and sparse finite structures. Although the notion of sparsity appears in various contexts and is a typical example of a hard to define notion, the authors devised an unifying classification of general classes of structures. This approach is very robust and it has many remarkable properties. For example the classification is expressible in many different ways involving most extremal combinatorial invariants. This study of sparse structures found applications in such diverse areas as algorithmic graph theory, complexity of...

Boolean circuit complexity is the combinatorics of computer science and involves many intriguing problems that are easy to state and explain, even for the layman. This book is a comprehensive description of basic lower bound arguments, covering many of the gems of this "complexity Waterloo" that have been discovered over the past several decades, right up to results from the last year or two. Many open problems, marked as Research Problems, are mentioned along the way. The problems are mainly of combinatorial flavor but their solutions could have great consequences in circuit complexity and...