Discrete Mathematics

Review of the German edition: “The whole book bears the clear signature of the author, at least for those who know him. This includes precision and a sense of the whole as well as the detail. The author’s enthusiasm for the material to be conveyed cannot be overlooked. Accompanied with the appropriate pace and high conciseness, it is an excellent source for teaching the fundamentals of mathematics to computer scientists.” Prof. Dr Juraj Hromkovic, ETH Zurich

Walter Hower was born into a farming family. After Kindergarten and primary as well as secondary school he attended the high school – and enjoyed his favourite subject Mathematics. After his military period as air force NATO soldier he studied Computer Science (including the minor Economics) – with the main focus on Artificial Intelligence – at the University of Kaiserslautern, with a really heavy pillar on Mathematics (incl. Mathematik für Informatiker II [Prof. Dr. Heinz Lüneburg]). Already at that time he thought about the need or an alternative to present this difficult material – the inspiration for this book.

Under supervision of Prof. PhD Jörg Siekmann he obtained the university (master) degree “Diplom-Informatiker”. Later on, he worked as research assistant under the guidance of Prof. Dr. W. Bibel and as PhD candidate in the group of Prof. Dr. Manfred Rosendahl, where he obtained the degree “Dr. rer. nat.” for his doctoral thesis “On constraint satisfaction and computer-aided layout design”. Immediately afterwards, Dr. Hower accepted the offer by Prof. PhD Jim Bowen to head a research group at University College Cork, National University of Ireland, where he invigorates an expert team on Constraint Processing – which finally evolved into the famous Cork Constraint Computation Centre. After a period in research labs and business companies, since more than 20 years the author now works as professor for Computer Science and Fundamentals of Mathematics.

Prof. Dr. Hower received the Teaching Prize 2006 of the state Baden-Württemberg and germany-wide the 3rd place Professor of the Year in Engineering / Computer Science in 2009.

Scientific activities include:

A Lattice-based Constraint Formalism, First Australian Knowledge Engineering Congress, Workshop on AI & Creativity, Melbourne, Australia, March 14⁄15, 1989;

The Relaxation of Unsolvable CSPs – General Problem Formulation and Specific Illustration in the Scheduling Domain, IJCAI-89 Workshop on Constraint Processing, Detroit, USA, August 20, 1989;

Parallel global constraint satisfaction, IJCAI-91 Workshop on Parallel Processing for Artificial Intelligence (PPAI-91), Darling Harbour, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, August 24⁄25, 1991;

Notes on complexity issues within constraint satisfaction, In IJCAI-93 Workshop on Knowledge-based Production Planning, Scheduling and Control, pp. 179–186, Chambéry, Savoie, France, August 29, 1993 (co-author);

Constraint Processing – Part I/II, Department of Mathematics and Computing Science, The University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji, March 29⁄30, 1994;

On an improvement of a global algorithm for the NP-complete constraint satisfaction problem, International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, California, USA, June 21, 1996;

Computational Complexity in Constraint-based Combinatorial Auctions, INFORMATIK 2008, 38. Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Informatik, München, September 8–13, 2008 (co-author);

Boolean Algebra and Probability Theory, EU Erasmus guest professor, Angers, France, November 2008;

Reviewer for the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, UK, 1996.

His research interests are combinatorial optimization as well as cooperative and non-cooperative game theory.