Description
Condition
GOOD: The cloth cover, binding and pages are actually in VERY GOOD condition. The book has been down-graded due to the previous owner having written their name in the book.
Product Details
The premise of this books is quite simple — “If a salesman, starting from his home city, is to visit exactly once each city on a given list and then return home, it is possible for him to select the order in which he visits the cities so that the total distances traveled in his tour is as small as possible. Let us assume he knows, for each pair of cities, the distance from one to another.”—from Chapter 1, Introduction.
Easy problem, right? Sure, for 5 or even 10 cities, but what if he is given his entire year at one time consisting of 250 cities? Oh, and what if he can’t pass through the same city or use the same road twice? Not so easy anymore. This book delves into the combinatorial aspects of optimizing these types of problems.
Well written with understandable dialog, proofs, theorems and exercises, this is an excellent addition to the graduate student or professional’s library of mathematical reference books.