Author | Ronald Graham, Donald Knuth, and Oren Patashnik |
---|---|
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Genre | Mathematics Computer science |
Publisher | Addison–Wesley |
Publication date | 1994 |
Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
Pages | 657 pp (Second Edition) |
ISBN | 0-201-55802-5 |
OCLC | 29357079 |
510 20 | |
LC Class | QA39.2 .G733 1994 |
Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science, by Ronald Graham, Donald Knuth, and Oren Patashnik, first published in 1989, is a textbook that is widely used in computer-science departments as a substantive but light-hearted treatment of the analysis of algorithms.
The book provides mathematical knowledge and skills for computer science, especially for the analysis of algorithms. According to the preface, the topics in Concrete Mathematics are "a blend of CONtinuous and disCRETE mathematics". Calculus is frequently used in the explanations and exercises. The term "concrete mathematics" also denotes a complement to "abstract mathematics".
The book is based on a course begun in 1970 by Knuth at Stanford University. The book expands on the material (approximately 100 pages) [1] in the "Mathematical Preliminaries" [2] section of Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming . Consequently, some readers use it as an introduction to that series of books.
Concrete Mathematics has an informal and often humorous style. The authors reject what they see as the dry style of most mathematics textbooks. The margins contain "mathematical graffiti", comments submitted by the text's first editors: Knuth and Patashnik's students at Stanford.
As with many of Knuth's books, readers are invited to claim a reward for any error found in the book—in this case, whether an error is "technically, historically, typographically, or politically incorrect". [3]
The book popularized some mathematical notation: the Iverson bracket, floor and ceiling functions, and notation for rising and falling factorials.
Donald Knuth used the first edition of Concrete Mathematics as a test case for the AMS Euler typeface and Concrete Roman font. [4]
In number theory, two integers a and b are coprime, relatively prime or mutually prime if the only positive integer that is a divisor of both of them is 1. Consequently, any prime number that divides a does not divide b, and vice versa. This is equivalent to their greatest common divisor (GCD) being 1. One says also ais prime tob or ais coprime withb.
Donald Ervin Knuth is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer science. Knuth has been called the "father of the analysis of algorithms".
Discrete mathematics is the study of mathematical structures that can be considered "discrete" rather than "continuous". Objects studied in discrete mathematics include integers, graphs, and statements in logic. By contrast, discrete mathematics excludes topics in "continuous mathematics" such as real numbers, calculus or Euclidean geometry. Discrete objects can often be enumerated by integers; more formally, discrete mathematics has been characterized as the branch of mathematics dealing with countable sets. However, there is no exact definition of the term "discrete mathematics".
In mathematics, the factorial of a non-negative integer , denoted by , is the product of all positive integers less than or equal to . The factorial of also equals the product of with the next smaller factorial:
TeX, stylized within the system as TeX, is a typesetting system which was designed and written by computer scientist and Stanford University professor Donald Knuth and first released in 1978. TeX is a popular means of typesetting complex mathematical formulae; it has been noted as one of the most sophisticated digital typographical systems.
The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP) is a comprehensive monograph written by the computer scientist Donald Knuth presenting programming algorithms and their analysis. Volumes 1–5 are intended to represent the central core of computer programming for sequential machines.
Big O notation is a mathematical notation that describes the limiting behavior of a function when the argument tends towards a particular value or infinity. Big O is a member of a family of notations invented by German mathematicians Paul Bachmann, Edmund Landau, and others, collectively called Bachmann–Landau notation or asymptotic notation. The letter O was chosen by Bachmann to stand for Ordnung, meaning the order of approximation.
Robert Sedgewick is an American computer scientist. He is the founding chair and the William O. Baker Professor in Computer Science at Princeton University and was a member of the board of directors of Adobe Systems (1990–2016). He previously served on the faculty at Brown University and has held visiting research positions at Xerox PARC, Institute for Defense Analyses, and INRIA. His research expertise is in algorithm science, data structures, and analytic combinatorics. He is also active in developing the college curriculum in computer science and in harnessing technology to make that curriculum available to anyone seeking the opportunity to learn from it.
Ronald Lewis Graham was an American mathematician credited by the American Mathematical Society as "one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years". He was president of both the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America, and his honors included the Leroy P. Steele Prize for lifetime achievement and election to the National Academy of Sciences.
In mathematics, the binary logarithm is the power to which the number 2 must be raised to obtain the value n. That is, for any real number x,
The fractional part or decimal part of a non‐negative real number is the excess beyond that number's integer part. The latter is defined as the largest integer not greater than x, called floor of x or . Then, the fractional part can be formulated as a difference:
Addison–Wesley is an American publisher of textbooks and computer literature. It is an imprint of Pearson plc, a global publishing and education company. In addition to publishing books, Addison–Wesley also distributes its technical titles through the O'Reilly Online Learning e-reference service. Addison–Wesley's majority of sales derive from the United States (55%) and Europe (22%).
Knuth reward checks are checks or check-like certificates awarded by computer scientist Donald Knuth for finding technical, typographical, or historical errors, or making substantial suggestions for his publications. The MIT Technology Review describes the checks as "among computerdom's most prized trophies".
Jeffrey David Ullman is an American computer scientist and the Stanford W. Ascherman Professor of Engineering, Emeritus, at Stanford University. His textbooks on compilers, theory of computation, data structures, and databases are regarded as standards in their fields. He and his long-time collaborator Alfred Aho are the recipients of the 2020 Turing Award, generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science.
In mathematics, the Iverson bracket, named after Kenneth E. Iverson, is a notation that generalises the Kronecker delta, which is the Iverson bracket of the statement x = y. It maps any statement to a function of the free variables in that statement. This function is defined to take the value 1 for the values of the variables for which the statement is true, and takes the value 0 otherwise. It is generally denoted by putting the statement inside square brackets:
Oren Patashnik is an American computer scientist. He is notable for co-creating BibTeX, and co-writing Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science. He is a researcher at the Center for Communications Research, La Jolla, and lives nearby in San Diego. Oren and his wife Amy have three children, Josh, Ariel, and Jeremy.
The dangerous bend or caution symbol ☡ was created by the Nicolas Bourbaki group of mathematicians and appears in the margins of mathematics books written by the group. It resembles a road sign that indicates a "dangerous bend" in the road ahead, and is used to mark passages tricky on a first reading or with an especially difficult argument.
The following tables list the computational complexity of various algorithms for common mathematical operations.
Carl Svante Janson is a Swedish mathematician. A member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences since 1994, Janson has been the chaired professor of mathematics at Uppsala University since 1987.
Thomas Nathaniel Hibbard was an American mathematician and computer scientist.