The subject of this book is the action of permutation groups on sets associated with combinatorial structures. Each chapter deals with a particular structure: groups, geometries, designs, graphs and maps respectively. A unifying theme for the first four chapters is the construction of finite simple groups. In the fifth chapter, a theory of maps on orientable surfaces is developed within a combinatorial framework. This simplifies and extends the existing literature in the field. The book is designed both as a course text and as a reference book for advanced undergraduate and graduate students. A feature is the set of carefully constructed projects, intended to give the reader a deeper understanding of the subject.

Graphs possessing a certain property are often characterized in terms of a type of configuration or subgraph which they cannot possess. For example, a graph is totally disconnected (or, has chromatic number one) if and only if it contains no lines; a graph is a forest (or, has point-arboricity one) if and only if it contains no cycles. Chartrand, Geller, and Hedetniemi [2] defined a graph to have property Pn if it contains no subgraph homeomorphic from the complete graph Kn+1 or the complete bipartite graphFor the first four natural numbers n, the graphs with property Pn are exactly the totally disconnected graphs, forests, outerplanar and planar graphs, respectively. This unification suggested the extension of many results known to hold for one of the above four classes of graphs to one or more of the remaining classes.

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