Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science

Ronald L. Graham, Donald E. Knuth, Oren Patashnik, and Stanley Liu

Citation: Computers in Physics 3, 106 (1989); doi: 10.1063/1.4822863

View online: https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4822863
View Table of Contents: https://aip.scitation.org/toc/cip/3/5
Published by the American Institute of Physics

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108 COMPUTERS IN PHYSICS, SEP IOCT 1888
BOOK
REVIEWS
From the Discrete
to the Continuous
Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for
Computer Science
Ronald L. Graham, Donald E. Knuth, and
Oren Patashnik
&25 pp., Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA,
1989. $39.75.
Reviewed by Stanley Liu
athematics tends to play a sig-
M nificant role in a modern-day
physicist's professional life.
This is a theme deftly brought out by
Wigner in a celebrated essay on the
unreasonable effectiveness of math-
ematics in the natural sciences-par-
ticularly, its effectiveness in physics. It
concepts turn up in entirely unexpected
connections. Moreover, they often per-
mit an unexpectedly close and accurate
em DXl
description of the phenomena in these
connections. "
Despite the seemingly restrictive
subtitle of this book, Concrete Math-
ematics: A Foundation for Computer
Science, is first and foremost a most
approachable book on mathematics:
mathematics pure and simple, math-
ematics theoretical and applied, math-
ematics combinatorial and algorithmic,
mathematics discrete and continuous.
It is also the kind of book on mathemat-
ics many physicists will enjoy reading
and be rewarded by the experience.
Concrete Mathematics is an en-
lightening, serious college-level text-
book treating several topics in detail, by
way of lucid, well-structured exposi-
tion, providing further guidance in the
form of extensive exercises (complete
with answers) and an occasional re-
search problem. The two senior co-
authors (Graham and Knuth) are
mathematicians of international re-
nown and respected scholars widely
known to the general public and the
computer science community through
their earlier popular works. The unmis-
takable presence of the clearly recogniz-
able talent and refreshing light touch of
the junior co-author (Patashnik) is also
keenly felt throughout this work.
This book is the outgrowth of a
course taught annually at Stanford
since 1970 under the same title, "Con-
crete Mathematics." In organization it
is an expanded, annotated version of the
Mathematical Preliminaries Section 1.2
in the monumental, (continuing)
multi-volume computer science classic
The Art of Computer Programming,
Donald E. Knuth, Addison-Wesley,
1973. The book is divided into nine
chapters, many of which may be read
independently as individual expository
articles.
As the reader quickly catches on,
an essential component of concrete
mathematics lies in the interplay
between the discrete and the continuous
and in the cross fertilization between
combinatorics and algorithmics. This
book achieves its highest, most endur-
ing level of success dealing with these
topics. There are masterful discussions
of the use of summations and manipula-
tions of indices and a delightful excur-
sion into "special numbers" of combin-
atoric significance. To facilitate the
discussions, Iverson's notation for the
ceiling and floor functions has been
adopted (do you know how to express
in closed form the nth term of the
ascending infinite sequence 1, 2, 2, 3, 3,
3, 4, ... in which the integer m occurs m
times in succession?), as has number
theorist Bachmann's notation on
asymptotic analysis ("big Dh" and
"little Dh", etc.), both now considered
standard notation in the analysis of
algorithms and appearing with increas-
ing frequency in physics journals.
It is common knowledge that phy-
sicists love and indeed thrive on analo-
gies. In these days while the analogy
between the discrete (summation) and
continuous (integral) "polynomial
sums and derivatives" is no longer
taught in the schools as part of the
regular curriculum, this book bucks the
trend and gently reminds the readers of three authors have taught the materials lyzes some aspects of hashing tech-
these fascinating interrelationships; it of the book a number of times since niques in computer science. Presented
offers a fresh perspective on some of 1970, the complete set of solutions to on a level seemingly less exalted and
these long neglected results in the these challenging problems is a gem in more mundane than the others, this
calculus of finite differences, which one clarity and illumination, which should chapter handles some topics more ex-
rarely encounters outside their custom- be of tremendous help to the serious plicitly belonging to computer science.
ary applications in numerical analysis reader. (As a printed marginal note in In summary, Concrete Mathemat-
and which faded in time with the advent the book wryly warned, "I would advise ics is a delightful, highly readable and
of the infinitesimal calculus. the casual student to stay away from informative book on mathematics, skill-
There are in this book interesting this course.") fully and expertly presented in an
discussions on elementary number the- There is a chapter on discrete accessible manner. •
ory, combinatorial identities (binomial probability, which is presented with an
coefficients, Stirling numbers of the eye for the beginning computer science
first and second kind, recast in an major. It gives definitions for the mean Stanley Wu- Wei Liu is a graduate of MIT and
The University of Pennsylvania. He has been
innovative and visually suggestive nota- and variance, discusses the binomial Assistant Editor of Physical Review B since
tion to highlight their combinatorial distribution, gives one example of a 1982 and Technical Editor of Chinese Physics
significance and origin), hypergeome- finite-state automaton, and then ana- since 1981.
tric functions (also in a generalized
notation), Euler numbers, Bernoulli
numbers (dealing with the sum of the
powers of integers), harmonic
numbers, Fibonacci numbers, recur-
rence, continuant polynomials and infi- //////////////////1//1/1/1//1/
nite continued fractions, generating
functions, asymptotic analysis, etc., to
mention just a few of the many topics
covered.
To all solid state physicists and
materials scientists whose work in-
volves molecular-beam epitaxy and
"Fibonacci (super) lattices" (and mod-
els of other "quasicrystals" such as
Penrose tilings) the reviewer heartily
recommends taking a closer look at
Section 6.6 on the Fibonacci numbers.
In about eleven pages, many elementary
results on these numbers are succinctly
and elegantly laid out, including the
beautifully symmetric Cassini identity
between any three successive Fibonacci
numbers. It should be noted, however,
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COMPIITEIS • PHYSICS, SIP/OCT 1889 107