This book presents the foundations and concepts of modern combinatorics in a clear and illustrative manner. Its accessible exposition is aimed at students of mathematics, the natural sciences, computer science, and economics, and allows for an easy, example-driven approach to the methods of combinatorics.
Beginning with the basic problems of combinatorics, the reader is gradually introduced to more advanced topics such as generating functions, recurrence relations and M bius inversion, as well as graph polynomials and finite automata. A large number of examples and exercises with solutions facilitate understanding and support consolidation and practical application of the material. This book is a translation of the original German 4th edition. The translation was done with the help of an artificial intelligence machine translation tool. A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book may read stylistically differently from a conventional translation.