Ebook: Probabilistic Combinatorics and Its Applications
- Series: Proceedings of Symposia in Applied Mathematics 44
- Year: 1992
- Publisher: Amer Mathematical Society
- Language: English
- pdf
The first paper contains a brief introduction to the theory of random graphs. The second paper reviews explicit constructions of random-like graphs and discusses graphs having a variety of useful properties. Isoperimetric inequalities, of paramount importance in probabilistic combinatorics, are covered in the third paper. The chromatic number of random graphs is presented in the fourth paper, together with a beautiful inequality due to Janson and the important and powerful Stein-Chen method for Poisson approximation. The aim of the fifth paper is to present a number of powerful new methods for proving that a Markov chain is "rapidly mixing" and to survey various related questions, while the sixth paper looks at the same topic in a very different context. For the random walk on the cube, the convergence to the stable distribution is best analyzed through Fourier analysis; the final paper examines this topic and proceeds to several more sophisticated applications. Open problems can be found throughout each paper.