Seminar - Fall 2019

Combinatorics

John Baez

In the fall of 2019 I taught a course on combinatorics based on combinatorial species and their generating functions. These free books served as reading material:

• François Bergeron, Gilbert Labelle, and Pierre Leroux, Introduction to the Theory of Species of Structures.
• Phillipe Flajolet and Robert Sedgewick, Analytic Combinatorics.
• Herbert S. Wilf, Generatingfunctionology.

Toward the end of this course I got so interested in the combinatorics of random permutations that I wrote a series of articles about them:

• Random permutations.

Here are hand-written notes for each class taken by Christian Williams, mixed in with notes on a more advanced seminar in which we developed some of the category-theoretic ideas in more detail.

• Week 1.
• Week 2.
• Week 3.
• Week 4 (notes by Gabriel Elvin).
• Week 5.
• Week 6.
• Week 7.
• Week 8.
• Week 9.
• Week 10.

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