Linear Algebra Methods for Combinatorial Problems (MATH 745) Homepage

Readings (legally available on the web)

• One main resource for the course is Jiri Matousek's Thirty-three Miniatures:Mathematical and Algorithmic Applications of Linear Algebra. There is a list of misprints for the text that is given here. A hard-copy of the text is available at a reasonable price from the AMS Bookstore here.


• A second main resource for the course is Laszlo Babai and Peter Frankl's text Linear Algebra Methods in Combinatorics.


• One may find many manuscripts deposited here, arXiv.org

• The American Mathematical Society maintains an important database, MathSciNet: Mathematical Reviews

• Fields Medallist Tim Gowers wrote a nice blog-post on our topic.


• My co-author Anurag Bishnoi has also compiled in his blog post a history on this topic.


• I know of several mathematicians who have taught courses on (or closely related to) this topic. Several have made notes available. These include those by Jozsef Balogh, my co-author Oleg Pikhurko , Viresh Patel, Jacob Fox ( Lecture 15 Notes , Lecture 16 Notes , Lecture 17 Notes ), Chris Godsil, Yufei Zhao (Algebraic Techniques and Linear Algebra), and Boris Bukh.

• One should never forget the Invertible Matrix Theorem.
  

Advice on writing mathematics

• Writing a Math Paper. From MIT Undergraduate Journal of Mathematics
• How to Write Mathematics, by Paul Halmos.

Articles to read about giving a mathematics talk

• P. Halmos' "How to Talk Mathematics"
  
• Terry Tao's "Talks are not the same as papers"
  
• Jordan Ellenberg's "Tips on giving talks"
  
• Bryna Kra's "Giving a talk"
  
• William Ross' "How to give a good 20-minute math talk"
  
• John McCarthy's "How to Give a Good Colloquium"
  

TeX Resources

• TeXShop (Mac) or MikTeX (Windows).
• Grätzer's Math into LaTeX web resources. Includes PDF Short Course and Symbol Table.

• Detexify will help you find symbols.
• One page symbol guide.
• Simple documentation about Beamer can be found at Beamer by Example.