Combinatorics is an area of mathematics primarily concerned with counting, both as a means and as an end to obtaining results, and certain properties of finite structures. It is closely related to many other areas of mathematics and has many applications ranging from logic to statistical physics and from evolutionary biology to computer science.
In mathematics, the probabilistic method is a nonconstructive method, primarily used in combinatorics and pioneered by Paul Erdős, for proving the existence of a prescribed kind of mathematical object. It works by showing that if one randomly chooses objects from a specified class, the probability that the result is of the prescribed kind is strictly greater than zero. Although the proof uses probability, the final conclusion is determined for certain, without any possible error.
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.
Fan-Rong King Chung Graham, known professionally as Fan Chung, is an American mathematician who works mainly in the areas of spectral graph theory, extremal graph theory and random graphs, in particular in generalizing the Erdős–Rényi model for graphs with general degree distribution.
Combinatorics is a branch of mathematics concerning the study of finite or countable discrete structures.
Extremal graph theory is a branch of combinatorics, itself an area of mathematics, that lies at the intersection of extremal combinatorics and graph theory. In essence, extremal graph theory studies how global properties of a graph influence local substructure. Results in extremal graph theory deal with quantitative connections between various graph properties, both global and local, and problems in extremal graph theory can often be formulated as optimization problems: how big or small a parameter of a graph can be, given some constraints that the graph has to satisfy? A graph that is an optimal solution to such an optimization problem is called an extremal graph, and extremal graphs are important objects of study in extremal graph theory.
Béla Bollobás FRS is a Hungarian-born British mathematician who has worked in various areas of mathematics, including functional analysis, combinatorics, graph theory, and percolation. He was strongly influenced by Paul Erdős from the age of 14.
Extremal combinatorics is a field of combinatorics, which is itself a part of mathematics. Extremal combinatorics studies how large or how small a collection of finite objects can be, if it has to satisfy certain restrictions.
Noga Alon is an Israeli mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Princeton University noted for his contributions to combinatorics and theoretical computer science, having authored hundreds of papers.
The Ahlswede–Daykin inequality, also known as the four functions theorem, is a correlation-type inequality for four functions on a finite distributive lattice. It is a fundamental tool in statistical mechanics and probabilistic combinatorics.
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.
Jon Hal Folkman was an American mathematician, a student of John Milnor, and a researcher at the RAND Corporation.
Vojtěch Rödl is a Czech American mathematician, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor at Emory University. He is noted for his contributions mainly to combinatorics having authored hundreds of research papers.
Benny Sudakov is an Israeli mathematician, who works mainly on extremal and probabilistic combinatorics.
David Conlon is an Irish mathematician who is a Professor of Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. His research interests are in Hungarian-style combinatorics, particularly Ramsey theory, extremal graph theory, combinatorial number theory, and probabilistic methods in combinatorics. He proved the first superpolynomial improvement on the Erdős–Szekeres bound on diagonal Ramsey numbers. He won the European Prize in Combinatorics in 2011 for his work in Ramsey theory and for his progress on Sidorenko's conjecture, and the Whitehead Prize in 2019.
Michael Krivelevich is a professor with the School of Mathematical Sciences of Tel Aviv University, Israel.
Robert (Rob) Morris is a mathematician who works in combinatorics, probability, graph theory and Ramsey theory. He is a researcher at IMPA.
Wojciech Samotij is a Polish mathematician and a full professor at the School of Mathematical Sciences at the Tel Aviv University. He is known for his work in combinatorics, additive number theory, Ramsey theory and graph theory.
Algorithms and Combinatorics is a book series in mathematics, and particularly in combinatorics and the design and analysis of algorithms. It is published by Springer Science+Business Media, and was founded in 1987.
József Balogh is a Hungarian-American mathematician, specializing in graph theory and combinatorics.
