The Book Review Column Review of Stable Marriage and Its Relation to Other Combinatorial Problems: an Introduction to Algorithm Analysis

1. Stable Marriage and its Relation to Other Combinatorial Problems: An Introduction to Algorithm Analysis by Donald Knuth. Reviewed by Tim McNichol. This book uses the stable marriage problem as motivation to look at some mathematics of interest. It would be useful for undergrads; however, for a serious study of matching there are more advanced and more up-to-date books available. 2. The Limits of Mathematics by Gregory J. Chaitin. Reviewed by Vladimir Tasic. This book is on algorithmic information theory and randomness as they relate to Berry’s Paradox (“the shortest number that requires less than 1000 characters to describe it” has just been described by that phrase in quotes, yet that phrase was less than 1000 characters.) 3. Privacy on the Line by Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau. Reviewed by Joseph Maklevitch. This book is about the balance between the citizen’s need for privacy and the government’s need to intrude to prevent or solve crimes. These issues are relevant now because of crytography and computers. The authors are respected theorists who have worked in cryptography, hence their comments are worthy considering. This book has caused some controversy in the math community— see the June-July 1998 issue of Notices of the AMS, also available at http://www.ams.org/notices. Or, better yet, read the book! 4. A Theory of Objects by Authors: Mart́ın Abadi and Luca Cardelli. Reviewed by Brian Postow. This book is about formalizing the semantics of object-oriented languages. To do this, a new calculus is introduced.