The Probabilistic Method

Rating:
Summary: A very interesting book
Review: I found this book very enjoyable to read. Although the underlying theme of the book is to demonstrate examples of proofs of existence of a property of a finite structure by showing the structure must have the property with positive probabiltiy, the book goes beyond this to cover areas such as circuit complexity and discrepancy theory that rely heavily on probabilistic arguments. A must read for anyone who wants to add probablistic tools to their toolbox for proving things about discrete structures.

Rating:
Summary: A very interesting book
Review: I found this book very enjoyable to read. Although the underlying theme of the book is to demonstrate examples of proofs of existence of a property of a finite structure by showing the structure must have the property with positive probabiltiy, the book goes beyond this to cover areas such as circuit complexity and discrepancy theory that rely heavily on probabilistic arguments. A must read for anyone who wants to add probablistic tools to their toolbox for proving things about discrete structures.

Rating:
Summary: Learn from the masters
Review: This book shows you how to approach problems in discrete mathematics that don't seem to be probabilistic at all, and nonetheless to apply probabilistic methods to find extremely sharp results. The book is full of beautifully chosen examples worked out by the authors, who are world class researchers in this subject area. Should be on the bookshelf of everyone who uses discrete mathematics.