25 September 2008

Best-seller impatiemment attendu

From "Quelques contributions au carrefour de la géométrie, de la combinatoire et des probabilités", by Nicolas Pouyanne:

"Dans leur best-seller impatiemment attendu [28], P. Flajolet et R. Sedgewick offrent un développement approfondi de la méthode symbolique en analyse
combinatoire, auquel on pourra se référer."

That is, "In their impatiently awaited best-seller [28], P. Flajolet and R. Sedgewick offer a detailed development of the symbolic method in combinatorial analysis, to which one will be able to refer."

I don't laugh often while reading mathematics, but this made me laugh, because I am among those impatiently awaiting this book. I've seen citations to Flajolet and Sedgewick's book Analytic Combinatorics in things written as long ago as 1998 or so; Amazon.com says the book will be out on December 31, 2008, and the publisher, Cambridge University Press says December 2008. It can be downloaded from Flajolet's web site.

Edited, January 22, 2009: my copy of this book arrived yesterday.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

So does this count as "proof by impending publication"? Not quite as fun as "proof by vigorous handwaving", but very amusing!

Michael Lugo said...

Not really. I feel like "proof by impending publication" refers to works that aren't publicly available; Flajolet and Sedgewick is publicly available on the web. (I'm not sure if it will stay that way after publication. In any case, I'll buy a copy, because I spend enough time flipping back and forth between my PDF of it and other windows that having a paper copy would be more practical.)

Anonymous said...

I downloaded it, but, wooooof, 800+ pages. I think the boss would be pissed if I printed it out.