Thomas Zaslavsky

Teaching Schedule

Math 386 (Fall 2022): Combinatorics

Class home page.
Textbook: Richard A. Brualdi, Introductory Combinatorics, fifth edition.

Past Courses

Quotations of the Month

The New York Times, Metropolitan Diary, July 17, 2022

'What About New York?'

Dear Diary:

I was walking south toward Penn Station and my train home at the end of a long day when I overheard the two people walking together in front of me.

“L.A. is tough,” one said. “It’s all about looks. If you don’t look good, it’s hard to get anywhere.”

“What about New York?” the other asked.

“New York?” the first person replied. “New York is more about brains than looks.”

— Frederick Hurford

Let America Be America Again
by Langston Hughes

[Excerpt]

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

Proclaim Liberty throughout all the Land
unto all the Inhabitants Thereof

The Liberty Bell
(from Leviticus 25:10)

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1755

Those who can't teach, do.
Those who can't do, preach.

So many errors are buried in “clearly, obviously” or “it is easy to see”. Many years ago my then colleague Juan Schäffer told me, “If it really is easy to see, it is easy to give the reason.”

—Jonathan Borwein, Generalisations, Examples and Counter-Examples in Analysis and Optimisation, page 10.

Past quotations of the month.

Research

My Publications and So Forth
A list of published and selected unpublished works.
A list arranged by topics.

My Research Interests
Combinatorics, especially matroids, arrangements of hyperplanes, and the topic to which I devote most of my attention, signed graphs and their relatives: see
The Home Page of Signed, Gain, and Biased Graphs
at which you will find the Mathematical Bibliography, the Glossary, and a glacially growing list of research problems.
And see the New York Times.

Other Places, On and Off Site

Fraktur (German) letters, printed and handwritten forms, from Sheila MacIntyre and Edith Witte, German-English Mathematical Vocabulary, Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh and London, 1956; second ed. 1966. Higher resolution (2 MB).

Combinatorics Seminar

Combinatorics News
- Gian-Carlo Rota (Our Hero!)
  Beautifully written biography at the National Academy of Sciences.
- eXtreme Combinatorics: Design theory schedules the XFL season. (February 3, 2001.)
- A Hat Problem: It sounds like a parlor game -- but it's mathematical coding theory. (April 10, 2001.)
- Our professors have their own number.
- The End of a Reign in Graph Theory: W.T. Tutte Dies, May 2, 2002.
- Archimedes did combinatorics 2200 years ago! Read all about it!
- Sphere packing: Solved at last? or, What is a proof, really?
- A statistical analysis of The New Yorker's fiction. (Not combinatorics, but it's an unusual senior thesis!)
- Obituary of Frank Harary, who liked to be called "Mr. Graph Theory".
- A book on probability that sounds like fascinating fun, full of anecdotes and math: CHANCES ARE... Adventures in Probability, by Michael Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan (New York Times review).
- Was Pythagoras really a mathematician at all? Read the controversy in the London Review of Books: "Other Lives", by M.F. Burnyeat.
- The New York Times discovers signed graphs! Actually, it's the math column by Steven Strogatz (Cornell) called "The Enemy of My Enemy".

African Mathematics, Multicultural Math, and Math Education
- A small and selective bibliography, classified by topic, concentrating on the works of Claudia Zaslavsky.
- A moderately complete chronological bibliography of the works of Claudia Zaslavsky.
- A brief life of Claudia Zaslavsky.

Historical
- N.E. Discrete Mathematics Day at Binghamton (Oct. 10, 2003): Program
- Binghamton meeting of the A.M.S. (Oct. 11-12, 2003): Program of the Special Session on Dowling Lattices

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Thomas Zaslavsky

Teaching Schedule

Past Courses