A First Course in Discrete Mathematics

Discrete mathematics has now established its place in most undergraduate mathematics courses. This textbook provides a concise, readable and accessible introduction to à number of topics in this area, such as enumeration, graph theory, latin squares and designs. It is aimed at second-year undergraduate mathematics students, and provides them with many of the basic techniques, ideas and results. A First Course in Discrete Mathematics contains many worked examples, and each chapter ends with a large number of exercises, with hints or solutions provided for most of them. As well as including standard topics such as binomial coefficients, recurrence, the inclusion-exclusion principle, trees, hamiltonian and eulerian graphs, latin squares and finite projective planes, the text also includes material on the ménage problem, magic squares, Catalan and Stirling numbers, and tournament schedules. The final chapter uses Hadamard matrices as the bridge from block designs to the idea of error-correcting codes, finishing with the construction of the perfect Golay code.