Discrete maths fundamentals

Question

Which is a good book to refresh discrete maths fundamentals for a grad student?

It would be great if the book has short and terse explanations of concepts with lots of worked out examples(/to be worked out exercises) to set the brain rolling.

Can someone suggest a similar refresher for graduate level algorithms?

Answer 1

Concrete Mathematics by Knuth is useful as a refresher AFAIK. But this is not a research level question so not really belongs here :).

Answer 2

I don't think it's a graduate textbook, but I really like the discrete math book by Matousek and Nesetril. It presents the topics more succinctly than the standard discrete math undergraduate texts and has much more interesting exercises.

Answer 3

Kleinberg and Tardos is a good book. I followed this book for an Introductory Graduate Discrete Mathematics course. It starts from basics and covers a good amount of material in depth. Kleinberg and Tardos has a lot of Exercises at the end of each chapter.

Algorithms book by S. Dasgupta, C.H. Papadimitriou, and U.V. Vazirani is an equally good book and is probably well-written than Kleinberg and Tardos. I have not read this book completely though.