Combinatorics of Permutations, 2nd Edition

Preface to the Second Edition

It has been eight years since the first edition of Combinatorics of Permuta-

tions was published. All parts of the subject went through significant progress

during those years. Therefore, we had to make some painful choices as to what

to include in the new edition of the book.

First, there is a new chapter in this edition, Chapter 9, which is devoted

to sorting algorithms whose original motivation comes from molecular biol-

ogy. This very young part of combinatorics is known for its easily stated

and extremely difficult problems, which sometimes can be solved using deep

techniques from remote-looking parts of mathematics.