The Unity of Combinatorics (Book content links)

Book: Ezra Brown and Richard K. Guy, The Unity of Combinatorics, AMS/MAA, The Carus Mathematical Monographs, Vol. 36, 2020, 353 pp.

Original article: Richard K. Guy, The Unity of Combinatorics, in Combinatorics Advances (1995), 129-159.

The review by me (Igor Pak) is available here. It appeared in the Notices of the AMS, vol. 69 (Jan 2022 issue), 108-111.
See also this short blog post I wrote on the review.

Table of Contents:

• Chapter 4: Richard K. Guy, Catwalks, Sandsteps and Pascal Pyramids (2000), see the free journal version or a local .pdf file
• Chapter 5: Richard K. Guy and Mark M. Paulhus, Unique Rook Circuits (2002), see the journal version

• Chapter 9: Ezra Brown and Nicholas Loehr, Why is PSL(2, 7)= GL (3,2)? (2009), see the journal version or an online .pdf file

• Chapter 11: Ezra Brown and Keith A. Mellinger, Kirkman’s schoolgirls wearing hats and walking through fields of numbers (2009), see the journal version or an online .pdf file

• Chapter 12: Ezra Brown, The many names of (7,3,1), (2002), see journal version or an online .pdf file

• Chapter 13: Ezra Brown, The many more names of (7,3,1), (2015), see the journal version or an online .pdf file

• Chapter 14: David L. Neel and Nancy Ann Neudauer, Matroids you have known (2009), see the journal version or an online .pdf file

• Chapter 16: Ezra Brown, The fabulous (11,5,2) biplane (2004), see the journal version or an online .pdf file

• Chapter 17: Alex Fink and Richard K. Guy, Rick’s Tricky Six Puzzle: S₅ sits specially in S₆ (2009), see the journal version or an online .pdf file.

• Chapter 19: Robert T. Curtis, The Miracle Octad Generator, unpublished preprint (1969).
  Versions of this paper have appeared in the author's thesis, and this paper based on the thesis. See also Conway-Sloane book, §11.

Talk video

See the video of Ezra Brown's talk "The Unity of Combinatorics: Connections and Wonders" on the book highlighting come of the connections.

This talk was given at a conference Celebrating the living legacy of the mathematics of Richard Guy which had other interesting talks as well.

Other reviews

See this review by Neil Calkin and Colm Mulcahy, Amer. Math. Monthly (Aug 2021), and
that review by Josef Lauri, zbMATH (2021).

See also this AMS blog post by Nicola Poser about Richard Guy and the book.

Click here to return to Igor Pak Home Page.

Last updated: 12/27/2021.