Review: A Seminar on Graph Theory

A Seminar on Graph Theory by Frank Harary
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Frank Harary was a prolific American mathematician specializing in graph theory. Dover published this collection he edited on the decennial of his passing. Harary held a faculty position in the University of Michigan Department of Mathematics from 1948-86 and in 1955 taught UM’s first graph theory and combinatorial theory courses. That department’s obituary recalls Harary as the “father” of modern graph theory, a discipline he helped found and popularize. Colleagues, peers and students fondly referred to Harary as “Mr. Graph Theory.”

A congenial warmth and exposition with a sense of humor come across in this two-part collection of lectures delivered by experts in the field over 1962–63 at University College, London. Harary’s own lectures make up first part of material from the seminar. The final three of these half-dozen talks on the then current topics focuses on work from George Pólya largely in an area of great interest to Harary: graph enumeration. This is a fast-paced, high-level overview of the state of the art with proofs mostly omitted entirely as Harary surveys the field for the audience. Of course, this was over a decade before the four color theorem became in 1976 the first major theorem proved using a computer, so it is described here as an open problem...

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