Chapter notes

G. Boole pioneered the development of symbolic logic, and he introduced many of the basic set notations in a book published in 1854. Modern set theory was created by G. Cantor during the period 1874-1895. Cantor focused primarily on sets of infinite cardinality. The term "function" is attributed to G. W. Leibniz, who used it to refer to several kinds of mathematical formulas. His limited definition has been generalized many times. Graph theory originated in 1736, when L. Euler proved that it was impossible to cross each of the seven bridges in the city of Königsberg exactly once and return to the starting point.

A useful compendium of many definitions and results from graph theory is the book by Harary [138].