Prolog: What This Book Is About

Many combinatorial problems have the following “extremal” formulation. Given a finite n-element set of points, the goal is to find the maximum (or minimum) possible cardinality of a system of its subsets satisfying certain assumptions. To get a feeling about what kind of problems this book deals with, we list several typical examples. (Although long, the list is far from being exhaustive.) The number(s) in brackets indicate the section(s), where the corresponding problem is discussed.