Review

Reviewed Work(s): Markov Chains -- Theory and Applications by Dean L. Isaacson and
Richard W. Madsen
Review by: Anthony Unwin
Source: Operational Research Quarterly (1970-1977), Vol. 28, No. 1, Part 2 (1977), pp. 236-
237
Published by: Palgrave Macmillan Journals on behalf of the Operational Research Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3008804
Accessed: 07-06-2017 13:14 UTC

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 Book Selectioni

carefully. Were it not for the price this would be a good book for an under-
graduate mathematics course.

ANTHONY UNWIN

REFERENCE

P. BILLINGSLEY (1961), Statistical Inrferecefior Mac-koay Pr-ocesses, University

Graph Theory with Applications

J. A. BONDY and U. S. R. MURTY

The Macmiiillan-i Press Ltd. 1976. 264 pp. ?14.50

The publishers state that this book was developed from courses given by
the authors to senior mathematics undergraduates and graduates and believe
that it will also be of interest to students and workers in O.R., computer
sciences and some branches of engineering. Quite so, provided that these
are also mathematics graduates.
To give the flavour of the mathematical level of this book, there are
numerous exercises interspersed in the text and exercise 1.1.3 on page 8,
after defining the Incidence and Adjacency Matrix, M and A respectively,
of a graph, is: "Show that if G is simple and the eigenvalues of A are distinct,
then the automorphism group of G is Abelian".
In short, this is a text book for mathematicians interested in graph theory.
As such it is very good since it forces the student to work through all the
exercises; even some of the applicable definitions are derived from exercises
rather than given directly. At the end, any reader who, having the required
mathematics, has worked through the book will have a good grasp of graph
theory.
Whether he will then be able able to apply what he has learned is another
matter. True, each chapter ends with at least one section under the general
subheading "Applications", but these again are strongly theory biased even
when discussing possible applications. Thus the last two sections of Chapter
1 (Graphs and Subgraphs) are entitled: "The shortest path problem" and
"Sperner's Lemma" respectively. The former is a mathematical exposition
of Dijkstra's algorithm and then discusses 'good' algorithms finishing with
exercises such as: "What additional instructions are needed in order that
Dijkstra's algorithm determine shortest paths rather than merely distances?"
and "Describe a good algorithm for determining (a) the components of a
graph, (b) the girth of a graph. How good are your algorithms?
The other applications section is a proof of Sperner's Lemma for the two
dimensional simplex and its use to deduce Brouwer's fixed point theorem,
finishing with the exercise: "State and Prove Sperner's Lemma for higher
dimensional Simplices".

237

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