文档介绍：CONCRETE
MATHEMATICS
Dedicated to Leonhard Euler (1707-l 783)
CONCRETE
MATHEMATICS
Ronald L. Graham
AT&T Bell Laboratories
Donald E. Knuth
Stanford University
Oren Patashnik
Stanford University
A
ADDISON-WESLEY PANY
Reading, Massachusetts Menlo Park, California New York
Don Mills, Ontario Wokingham, England Amsterdam Bonn
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Preface
“A odience, level, THIS BOOK IS BASED on a course of the same name that has been taught
and treatment - annually at Stanford University since 1970. About fifty students have taken it
a description of
such matters is each year-juniors and seniors, but mostly graduate students-and alumni
what prefaces are of these classes have begun to spawn similar courses elsewhere. Thus the time
supposed to be seems ripe to present the material to a wider audience (including sophomores).
about.” It was a dark and stormy decade when Concrete Mathematics was born.
- P. R. Halmos 11421
Long-held values were constantly being questioned during those turbulent
years; college campuses were hotbeds of controversy. The college curriculum
itself was challenged, and mathematics did not escape scrutiny. John Ham-
mersley had just written a thought-provoking article “On the enfeeblement of
mathematical skills by ‘Modern Mathematics’ and by similar soft intellectual
trash in schools and universities”[145]; other worried mathematicians [272]
“People do acquire even asked, “Can mathematics be saved?” One of the present authors had
a little brief author- embarked on a series of books called The Art puter Programming, and
ity by equipping
themselves with in writing the first volume he (DEK) had found that there were mathematical
jargon: they can tools missing from his repertoire; the mathematics he needed for a thorough,
pontificate and air a well-grounded understanding puter programs was quite different from
superficial expertise.
But what we should what he’d learned