Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, March 2025
Attention
conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualification to opine on
pure mathematics, sociology, or adaptations of Old English epic poetry. Also,
most of my reading this month was done at odd hours and/or while chasing after
a toddler, so I'm less reliable and more cranky than usual.
- Philippe Flajolet and Robert Sedgewick, Analytic Combinatorics
[doi:10.1017/CBO9780511801655]
- I should begin by admitting that I have never learned much
combinatorics, and never really liked what I did learn. To say my
knowledge topped out at Stirling's approximation to $n!$ is only
a mild exaggeration. Nonetheless, after reading this book, I think I begin to
get it. I'll risk making a fool of myself by explaining.
- We start with some class $\mathcal{A}$ of discrete, combinatorial objects, like a type of
tree or graph obeying some constraints and rules of construction. There's a
notion of "size" for these objects (say, the number of nodes in the graph, or
the number of leaves in the tree). We are interested in counting the number
of objects of size $n$. This gives us a sequence $A_0, A_1, A_2, \ldots A_n, \ldots$.
- Now whenever we have a sequence of numbers $A_n$, we can encode it in a "generating function"
\[
A(z) = \sum_{n=0}^{\infty}{A_n z^n}
\]
and recover the sequence by taking derivatives at the origin:
\[
A_n = \frac{1}{n!} \left. \frac{d^n A}{dz^n} \right|_{z=0}
\]
(I'll claim the non-mathematician's privilege of not worrying about whether the series converges, the derivatives exist, etc.) When I first encountered this idea as a student, it seemed rather pointless to me --- we define the generating function in terms of the sequence, so why do we need to differentiate the GF to get the sequence?!? The trick, of course, is to find indirect
ways of getting the generating function.
- Part A of the book is about what the authors call the "symbolic method" for
building up the generating functions of combinatorial classes, by expressing
them in terms of certain basic operations on simpler classes. The core
operations, for structures with unlabeled parts, are disjoint union, Cartesian
product, taking sequences, taking cycles, taking multisets, and taking power
sets. Each of these corresponds to a definite transformation of the generating
function: if $\mathcal{A}$s are ordered pairs of $\mathcal{B}$s and $\mathcal{C}$s (so the operation is Cartesian product), then $A(z) = B(z)
C(z)$, while if $\mathcal{A}$s are sequences of $\mathcal{B}$s, then $A(z) = 1/(1-B(z))$, etc.
(Chapter I.) For structures with labeled parts, slightly different, but
parallel, rules apply. (Chapter II.) These rules can be related very
elegantly to constructions with finite automata and regular languages, and to
context-free languages. If one is interested not just in the number of objects
of some size $n$, but the number of size $n$ with some other "parameter" taking
a fixed value (e.g., the number of graphs on $n$ nodes with $k$ nodes of degree
1), multivariate generating functions allow us to count them, too (Chapter
III). (Letting $k$ vary for fixed $n$ of course gives a probability
distribution.) When the parameters of a complex combinatorial object are
"inherited" from the parameters of the simpler objects out of which it is
built, the rules for transforming generating functions also apply.
- In favorable cases, we get nice expressions (e.g., ratios of polynomials)
for generating functions. In less favorable cases, we might end up with
functions which are only implicitly determined, say as the solution to some
equation. Either way, if we now want to decode the generating function $A(z)$
to get actual numbers $A_1, A_2, \ldots A_n, \ldots$, we have to
somehow extract the coefficients of the power series. This is the subject of
Part B, and where the "analytical" part of the title comes in. We turn to
considering the function $A(z)$ as a function on the complex plane.
Specifically, it's a function which is analytic in some part of the
plane, with a limited number of singularities. Those singularities turn out to
be crucial: "the location of a function's singularities dictates the
exponential growth of its coefficients; the nature of a functions singularities
determine the subexponential factor" (p. 227, omitting symbols). Accordingly,
part II is a crash course in complex analysis for combinatorists, the upshot of
which is to relate the coefficients in power series to certain integrals around
the origin. One can then begin to approximate those integrals, especially for
large $n$. Chapter V carries this out for rational and "meromorphic"
functions, ch. VI for some less well-behaved ones, with applications in
ch. VII. Chapter VIII covers a somewhat different way of approximating the
relevant integrals, namely the saddle-point method, a.k.a. Laplace
approximation applied to contour integrals in the complex plane.
- Part C, consisting of Chapter IX, goes back to multivariate generating
functions. I said that counting the number of objects with size $n$ and parameter $k$ gives us, at each fixed $n$, a probability distribution over $k$. This chapter considers the convergence of these probability distributions as $n \rightarrow \infty$, perhaps after suitable massaging / normalization. (It accordingly includes a crash course in convergence-in-distribution for
combinatorists.) A key technique here is to write the multivariate generating function as a small perturbation of a univariate generating function, so that
the asymptotics from Part B apply.
- There are about 100 pages of appendices, to fill gaps in the reader's
mathematical background. As is usual with such things, it helps to have at
least forgotten the material.
- This is obviously only for mathematically mature readers. I have spent a
year making my way through it, as time allowed, with pencil and paper at hand.
But I found it worthwhile, even enjoyable, to carve out that time. §
- (The thing which led me to this, initially, was trying to come up with an
answer to "what on Earth
is the cumulative generating function doing?" If we're dealing with
labeled structures, then the appropriate generating function is what the
authors call the "exponential generating function", $A(z) =
\sum_{n=0}^{\infty}{A_n z^n / n!}$. If $A$'s are built as sets of $B$'s, then
$A(z) = \exp(B(z))$. Turned around, then, $B(z) = \log{A(z)}$ when $A$'s are
composed as sets of $B$'s. So if the moments of a random variable
could be treated as counting objects of a certain size, so $A_n = \mathbb{E}\left[ X^n \right]$
is somehow the number of objects of size $n$, and we can interpret these objects as
sets, the cumulant generating function would be counting the number of
set-constituents of various sizes. I do not regard this as a very satisfying
answer, so I am going to have to learn even more math.)
- Arthur L. Stinchcombe, Information and Organizations [Open access]
- A series of essays on organizations --- mostly for-profit corporations, but
also universities --- as information-processing systems. The main thesis is
that organizations "[grow] toward sources of news, news about the uncertainties
that most affect their outcomes" (pp. 5--6), and then react to that news on an
appropriate (generally, quick) time-scale. This is a functionalist idea, but
Stinchcombe is careful to try to make it work, making arguments about how an
organization's need to perform these functions comes to be felt by
actual people in the organization, people who are in positions to do something
about it. (Usually, his arguments on this score are persuasive.) This is by
far the best thing I've seen in sociology about social structures as
information-processing systems; I'm a bit disappointed in myself that I didn't
read it a long time ago. §
- Zach Weinersmith and Boulet, Bea Wolf
- The first part of Beowulf, through the defeat of Grendel,
adapted into a comic-book about joyously ill-behaved kids in an American
suburb. Rather incredibly, it works.
- (Thanks to Jan Johnson for the book.)
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur;
Mathematics;
Automata and Calculating Machines;
Enigmas of Chance;
Commit a Social Science;
The Dismal Science;
The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts;
The Commonwealth of Letters
Posted at March 31, 2025 23:59 | permanent link