Combinatorics Through Guided Discovery, 2004a

Preface to PreTeXt edition
At the time of his death in 2005, Ken Bogart was working on this NSF-supported
effort to create a combinatorics textbook that developed the key ideas of undergraduate
combinatorics through “guided discovery”, or what many today typically call
inquiry-based learning. The project was under contract with Springer-Verlag for a
commercially-published print edition, but Ken’s untimely passing left the project
in an unfinished state. Bogart’s family asked the Department of Mathematics at
Dartmouth College, where he had spent his entire career after earning his Ph.D.
from Caltech in 1968, to distribute the text freely under the GNU Free Documentation
License. This open-source release came with some notes, however. Those
notes, listed on the book’s Dartmouth page, were:
1. The contents of the archive are released under the terms of the gnu
Free Documentation License (FDL), a copy of which is contained
in the archive.
2. The contents of the archive are released in “as is” condition, which
in particular means that the state of the source files is not in agreement
with the pdf versions of the text. A README offers some
guidance.
3. Many people have already used the textbook in courses at various
universities throughout the country. It is the hope of the Bogart
family that this project continues to grow to completion with the
efforts of those who download this archive.
The caveat in the second note seemed to be the largest toward fulfilling the goal of
the third, as the “official” version of the pdf had a different chapter structure than
the L A TEX source files provided. This was mostly the result of splitting a chapter into
two and rearranging a few topics, but there were also places where problems were
split or merged between the source version and the pdf version. The pdf version
also came with copious hints that readers could access online, but no L A TEX source
existed for these hints.
This PreTeXt edition of Combinatorics through Guided Discovery attempts to help
fulfill the Bogart family’s wish to see the project grow and reach a complete state.
One of us (mtk) had used the official pdf to teach a combinatorics course in Winter
2015 and mentioned this fact at a workshop on open source textbooks and PreTeXt
(then MathBook xml) organized by the American Institute of Mathematics in the
spring of 2016. This caught the attention of kem, since Combinatorics through Guided
xi