Probability Galore. Review of The Probabilistic Method, by Noga Alon and Joel H. Spencer, with an appendix on open problems by Paul Erdös

Abstract

Noga Alon is a Professor of Mathematics at Tel Aviv University, Israel. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1983 and has had visiting positions in various research institutes including MIT, IBM Almaden Research Center, Bell Laboratories, and Bellcore. He serves on the editorial boards of eight technical journals and has been an invited speaker at many conferences, including the 1990 International Congress of Mathematicians. He has published more than 100 papers, mostly in combinatorics and theoretical computer science, and received the Erdös Prize in 1989 and the Feher Prize in 1991. Joel H. Spencer is Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Courant Institute of New York University. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1970 and has been a visiting professor at MIT, the University of Reading, England, the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and the Mathematics Institute in Budapest. He is the cofounder and coeditor of the journal Random Structures & Algorithms and is also a Sloan Foundation Fellow. He, too, has published more than 100 technical research papers and has also coauthored Probabilistic Methods in Combinatorics with Paul Erdös and Ramsey Theory (2nd ed.). Wiley, 1990, with Ronald Graham and Bruce Rothschild. The reviewer, Peter Fishborn, received his Ph.D. from Case Institute of Technology in 1962. He is a member of the Mathematical Sciences Research Center at AT & T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ. His research interests include discrete mathematics and decision theory. His most recent book is Nonlinear Preference and Utility Theory, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1988. He was awarded the Frank P. Ramsey Medal of the Operations Research Society of America in 1987.