With the advent of computers, algorithmic principles play an ever increasing role in mathematics. Algorithms have to exploit the structure of the underlying mathematical object, and properties exploited by algorithms are often closely tied to classical structural analysis in mathematics. This connection between algorithms and structure is in particular apparent in discrete mathematics, where proofs are often constructive, and can be turned into algorithms more directly. The principle of greediness plays a fundamental role both in the design of continuous algorithms (where it is called the...

This comprehensive textbook on combinatorial optimization emphasizes theoretical results and algorithms with provably good performance, in contrast to heuristics. The text contains complete but concise proofs, and also provides numerous exercises and references.