Ebook: Nets, puzzles, and postmen

A comprehensive study of the historic development of division in extreme and mean ratio ("the golden number"), this text traces the concept's development from its first appearance in Euclid's Elements through the 18th century. The coherent but rigorous presentation offers clear explanations of DEMR's historical transmission and features numerous illustrations "In this book, the renowned mathematics writer Peter Higgins brings the world of networks to life, in an exploration that ranges from mathematical puzzles to the hidden mathematical structures that underpin many real-world phenomena."--BOOK JACKET. Nets, trees, and lies -- Trees -- Chemical isomers -- Lying liars and the lies they tell -- Trees and games of logic -- Familiar logic games -- Exotic squares and Sudoku -- The nature of nets -- The small world phenomenon -- The bridges of Königsberg -- Hand-shaking and its consequences -- Cycles that take you on a tour -- Party problems -- Colouring and planarity -- The four-colour map problem -- How edges can ruin planarity -- Rabbits out of hats: guarding the gallery ; innocent questions of points and lines ; Brouwer's fixed point theorem -- How to traverse a network -- The Euler-Fleury method -- The Chinese postman problem -- One-way systems -- Nets that remember where you have been -- Nets as machines -- Automata with something to say -- Lattices -- Spanning networks -- Sorting the traffic -- Greedy salesmen -- Finding the quick route -- The P versus NP controversy -- Going with the flow -- Network capacities and finding suitable boys -- Marriage and other problems -- Harems, maximum flows, and other things -- Novel applications of nets -- Instant insanity -- Sharing the wine -- Jealousy problems -- Mazes and labyrinths -- Trees and codes -- Reassembling RNA chains -- For connoisseurs