The Book Review Column

Graph Theory in America: The First Hundred Years (Princeton University Press, 2023) by Robin Wilson, John J. Watkins, and David J. Parks chronicles the first hundred years of graph theory in North America, starting with the arrival of James Joseph Sylvester at Johns Hopkins University in 1876 and ending with the proof of the four color theorem by Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken in 1976. Computability and Complexity: Foundations and Tools for Pursuing Scientific Applications (Springer, 2024) by decorated author Rod Downey is a new undergraduate textbook that covers advanced topics such as parameterized complexity, generic case complexity, and smoothed analysis. How to Think about Algorithms, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Jeff Edmonds aims to teach students to think like a designer of algorithms. This new edition includes a short chapter on machine learning algorithms and more than 150 new exercises. A review of the first edition of this book appeared in this column in 2009. Differential Privacy (The MIT Press, 2025) by Simson L. Garfinkel, a senior data scientist at the US Department of Homeland Security, explains the algorithmic technology used by Google, Apple, and the US Census Bureau to protect the privacy of individuals in large datasets.