2007•Journal for History of MathematicsRequires access
The Origin of Combinatorics
Ree Sangwook, Youngmee Koh
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Abstract
Combinatorics, often called the 21 st century mathematics, has turned out a very important subject for the present information era. Modern combinatorics has started from some mathematical works, for example, Pascal's triangle and the binomial coefficients, and Euler's problems on the partitions of integers and Konigsberg's bridge problem, and so on. In this paper, we investigate the origin of combinatorics by looking over some interesting ancient combinatorial problems and some important problems which have started various subfields of combinatorics. We also discuss a little on the role of combinatorics in mathematics and mathematics education.