18.315 (Fall 2009): COMBINATORIAL THEORY

The topic will be generating functions. Most of the material will come from the lecturer's books Enumerative Combinatorics, volumes 1 and 2. For the latest version of Chapter 1, click here.

Office hours: MW 11-12, or by appointment.

Grader: Dorian Croitoru, 2-251, dorian@math.mit.edu. Office hour: Monday 12-1, or by appointment.

Problem sets. Problem sets will be due about once every two weeks. You will be asked to hand in a subset of your choosing of specified size from a list of problems. Hand in at most one part from any multipart problem. Each problem has a difficulty factor [d], such as [3-]. This is converted into a weight w(d), as follows:

w(1-) = 0.1, w(1) = 0.3, w(1+) = 0.5
w(2-) = 1, w(2) = 2, w(2+) = 3
w(3-) = 5, w(3) = 8, w(3+) = 12
w(4-) = 18, w(4) = 25, w(4+) = 50
w(5-), w(5): depends on solution

Each part will have ten points. Your grade on a problem will be the number of points you receive (out of 10) times the difficulty weight. The weights assume that you solved the problem from scratch. If it appears that you already had some familiarity with the problem, the weight may be reduced.

Problems should be solved primarily on your own. Some "reasonable" collaboration is permitted, but you shouldn't just obtain the solution from another source. Do not hand in a solution that you did not obtain on your own or did not obtain by collaboration with another student in the course!

Problem assignments

Additional problems (continually updated)

Chapter 1, second edition

Further requirement: an in-class quiz will be given on December 9. It will count as 20% of the course grade. It will be closed book and will cover all the class material.