Book Review: Graph theory with applications
Blanche Descartes · Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society · 1977
When I first entered the world of Mathematics, I became aware of a strange and little-regarded sect of "Graph Theorists", inhabiting a shadowy borderland known to the rest of the community as the "slums of Topology".What changes there have been in a few short years!That shadowy borderland has become a thriving metropolis.International conferences on Graph Theory occur with almost embarrassing frequency.Journals on Graph Theory abound: I once counted the Editorial Offices of three of them in one of the mathematical departments of one of the Universities of one of the smaller cities of Canada.Any connection with Topology is likely to be firmly repudiated as soon as noted.I became aware of the burgeoning of Graph Theory when I studied the 1940 paper of Brooks, Smith, Stone and Tutte in the Duke Mathematical Journal, ostensibly on squared rectangles.They wrote of trees and Kirchhoffs Laws, of 3-connection and planarity, of duality and symmetry, of determinantal identities and coprime integers, ~ all in the Quest of the Perfect Square.I invariably recommend that paper to my students."Go to it", I say, "you will Tind tongues in trees, books in the running Brooks, Sermons in Stones, and good in every thing' ". [8].