Math professor provides inquiry-based learning techniques

By: Kyle Petersen

"Inquiry-Based Enumerative Combinatorics: One, Two, Skip a Few... Ninety-Nine, One Hundred" offers the opportunity to create a uniquely engaging combinatorics classroom by embracing inquiry-based learning techniques. Readers are provided with a carefully chosen progression of theorems to prove and problems to actively solve. Students will feel a sense of accomplishment as their collective inquiry traces a path from the basics to important generating function techniques.

This book is ideal for lower-division undergraduate students majoring in math or computer science, as there are no formal mathematics prerequisites. Because it includes many connections to recent research, students of any level who are interested in combinatorics will also find this a valuable resource.

What inspired you to write this book? 

The book arose from course notes I  used in teaching the undergraduate combinatorics course, but my inspiration for the pedagogical approach comes from a high school teacher of mine back in Oklahoma. From the first day of that class until the last, nearly two years later, he taught us without ever "telling" us. He asked good questions and probed our thinking to draw out the ideas he wanted us to explore. That is the heart of an inquiry-based approach, and the book is dedicated, in part, to him.

If you like numbers, patterns and exploring your thinking, "Inquiry-Based Enumerative Combinatorics" has something for you.

Kyle Petersen, a professor of mathematical sciences, has been at DePaul since 2009. As a member of the Academy of Inquiry-Based Llearning, he has helped to mentor other college math faculty and to run workshops that promote this style of teaching. As a researcher in combinatorics, he has written more than 30 research articles and delivered more than 50 talks.

Springer, June 2019, 238 pages