Books by Richard P. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Stanley

Richard Stanley's two-volume basic introduction to enumerative combinatorics has become the standard guide to the topic for students and experts alike. This thoroughly revised second edition of Volume 1 includes ten new sections and more than 300 new exercises, most with solutions, reflecting numerous new developments since the publication of the first edition in 1986. The author brings the coverage up to date and includes a wide variety of additional applications and examples, as well as updated and expanded chapter bibliographies. Many of the less difficult new exercises have no solutions so that they can more easily be assigned to students. The material on P-partitions has been rearranged and generalized; the treatment of permutation statistics has been greatly enlarged; and there are also new sections on q-analogues of permutations, hyperplane arrangements, the cd-index, promotion and evacuation and differential posets.

Catalan numbers are probably the most ubiquitous sequence of numbers in mathematics. This book gives for the first time a comprehensive collection of their properties and applications to combinatorics, algebra, analysis, number theory, probability theory, geometry, topology, and other areas. Following an introduction to the basic properties of Catalan numbers, the book presents 214 different kinds of objects counted by them in the form of exercises with solutions. The reader can try solving the exercises or simply browse through them. Some 68 additional exercises with prescribed difficulty levels present various properties of Catalan numbers and related numbers, such as Fuss-Catalan numbers, Motzkin numbers, Schroder numbers, Narayana numbers, super Catalan numbers, q-Catalan numbers and (q,t)-Catalan numbers. The book ends with a history of Catalan numbers by Igor Pak and a glossary of key terms. Whether your interest in mathematics is recreation or research, you will find plenty of fascinating and stimulating facts here.