"A very simple but instructive problem was treated by Jacob Steiner, the famous representative of geometry at the University of Berlin in the early nineteenth century. Three villages A, B, C are to be joined by a system of roads of minimum length. " Due to this remark of Courant and Robbins (1941), a problem received its name that actually reaches two hundred years further back and should more appropriately be attributed to the French mathematician Pierre Fermat. At the end of his famous treatise "Minima and Maxima" he raised the question to find for three given points in the plane a fourth...
"A very simple but instructive problem was treated by Jacob Steiner, the famous representative of geometry at the University of Berlin in the early ni...
The advent of fast computers and the search for efficient algorithms revolutionized combinatorics and brought about the field of discrete mathematics. This book is an introduction to the main ideas and results of discrete mathematics, and with its emphasis on algorithms it should be interesting to mathematicians and computer scientists alike. The book is organized into three parts: enumeration, graphs and algorithms, and algebraic systems. There are 600 exercises with hints and solutions to about half of them. The only prerequisites for understanding everything in the book are linear algebra...
The advent of fast computers and the search for efficient algorithms revolutionized combinatorics and brought about the field of discrete mathematics....
