ALCOMFT-TR-02-123

Philippe Flajolet and Robert Sedgewick
Analytic Combinatorics, Symbolic Combinatorics
INRIA. Work package 4. May 2002.

Abstract: This booklet develops in nearly 200 pages the basics of combinatorial enumeration through an approach that revolves around generating functions. The major objects of interest here are words, trees, graphs, and permutations, which surface recurrently in all areas of discrete mathematics. The text presents the core of the theory with chapters on unlabelled enumeration and ordinary generating functions, labelled enumeration and exponential generating functions, and finally multivariate enumeration and generating functions. It is largely oriented towards applications of combinatorial enumeration to random discrete structures and discrete mathematics models, as they appear in various branches of science, like statistical physics, computational biology, probability theory, and, last not least, computer science and the analysis of algorithms.

Postscript file: ALCOMFT-TR-02-123.ps.gz (1697 kb).