Brief description:  This course will be around various combinatorial structures including graphs, trees and circuits, designs, latin squares, projective planes and codes at a graduate level. We might go over the solution of Euler's problem on mutually orthogonal latin squares. Meanwhile you can try and construct your own MOLS. We may also do the Bruck-Ryser-Chowla theorem.
 

Grading and projects:  The course grade will be assigned on the basis of a student project. The project may consist of a lecture, essay or computer program on a topic related to the course. It can be done individually or in groups. Suggestions for suitable topics will be made during the course.
 

Prerequisite:  No formal prerequisites other than familiarity with proofs.
 

Textbook:  J. H. van Lint and R. M. Wilson, A course in Combinatorics, 2nd edition. Cambridge Univ. Press.    
 

Links

• A short proof of Hadamard's inequality, courtesy of Jeff Vaaler.
• Online lecture notes by B. Cherowitzo.
• World combinatorics exchange.
• A short course on combinatorial designs, by I. Anderson and I. Honkala.
• Pari script for computing with prolongations of latin squares.
• Notes of Rohit's lectures in pdf and postscript and figures in JPEG fig. 1, fig. 2, and powerpoint.

This page has been visited [an error occurred while processing this directive] times since February, 16, 2001.