A First Course in Combinatorial Mathematics

The spirit and aim of this book is to present a compact introduction to the basic combinatorial tools - such as recurrence relations, generating functions, incidence matrices, and the inclusion-exclusion principle - that will give the reader a flavour of the distinctive characteristics of this attractive and increasingly important branch of mathematics. In this new edition, Steiner triple systems are constructed and S(5,8,24) is obtained via the Golay code of length 24; also included is an application of the marriage theorem to score sequences of tournaments.