Design Theory

In order to teach students some of the most important techniques used for constructing combinatorial designs, Lindner and Rodger (both Auburn U.) focus on several basic designs: Steiner triple systems, latin squares, and finite projective and affine plane. Having set these out, they start to add additional interesting properties that may be required, such as resolvability, embeddings, orthogonality, and even some more complicated structures such as Steiner quadruple systems. They do not mention a date for the first edition, but have added extensive material introducing embeddings, directed designs, the universal algebraic representations of designs, and intersection properties of designs. Check out their pictures, they say, which make the constructions more comprehensible to students. Answers are provided for selected problems. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)