17 March 2011

In the library at Berkeley, there is a copy of Richard Stanley's book Enumerative Combinatorics, volume 2.

I think a few of you will be amused to learn that when I opened this book at random, it fell open to the famous exercise giving sixty-six interpretations of the Catalan numbers.

3 comments:

Veky said...

Obviously, it has been opened (and held open for a longer time) on that page many times before. :-)

Brent said...

Haha! When I read your post, I pulled out my copy and opened it randomly... and it fell open to the *solutions* to said famous exercise.

Anonymous said...

I am pretty sure I own the book, and pretty sure that is the page I turned to first...

I have no idea what makes them so appealing.

Jonathan