Bücher von Jiri Herman

This book is intended as a text for a problem-solving course at the first- or second-year university level, as a text for enrichment classes for talented high-school students, or for mathematics competition training. It can also be used as a source of supplementary material for any course dealing with algebraic equations or inequalities, or to supplement a standard elementary number theory course. There are already many excellent books on the market that can be used for a problem-solving course. However, some are merely collections of prob- lems from a variety of fields and lack cohesion. Others present problems according to topic, but provide little or no theoretical background. Most problem books have a limited number of rather challenging problems. While these problems tend to be quite beautiful, they can appear forbidding and discouraging to a beginning student, even with well-motivated and carefully written solutions. As a consequence, students may decide that problem solving is only for the few high performers in their class, and abandon this important part of their mathematical, and indeed overall, education.

A look at solving problems in three areas of classical elementary mathematics: equations and systems of equations of various kinds, algebraic inequalities, and elementary number theory, in particular divisibility and diophantine equations.

This book presents methods of solving problems in three areas of elementary combinatorial mathematics: classical combinatorics, combinatorial arithmetic, and combinatorial geometry.