Question

What are the greatest textbooks on Discrete Mathematics?

Answer 1

Graham, Knuth and Patashnik's *Concrete Mathematics* maybe?  Or do I have the wrong level?

Answer 2

In what sense is Biggs a "foundational" author?  I looked up his book titled *Discrete Mathematics*, which I'd never heard of before, and the first edition came out in 1985. I assure you that the field of discrete math was well established before the 1980s.  


A nice book to look at is *Concrete Mathematics* by Graham, Knuth, and Patashnik.  It even has its own Wikipedia page, at which the bottom lists the chapter topics.

Answer 3

The text by Susannah Epp is very popular amongst undergrad programs.

Answer 4

(In roughly ascending order of difficulty)

Knuth's: Concrete Mathematics

Bona's: A Walk Through Combinatorics / Cameron's: Combinatorics

Aigner's: A Course on Enumeration, Combinatorial Theory (Both Springer's GTM I think)

Stanley: Enumerative Combinatorics (hard af)

Answer 5

Discrete math is really more of a collection of many math fields from number theory to combinatorics to geometry to computing science.

And more confusingly, often universities offer an undergrad course called “discrete mathematics” that also includes continuous concepts like epsilon  delta proofs.