Ordering block designs. Gray codes, universal cycles and configuration orderings (Q426279)

The question of (an efficient/natural) listing/ordering of combinatorial objects of a particular kind has been a subject of interest for the last several decades. The forerunners here were the Gray codes (recursive and natural construction of a Hamilton cycle for the hypercube graph \(Q_k\)) and the de Bruijn cycles where one asks for a construction of a binary word of length \(2^k\) in which every binary word of length \(k\) appears a unique position when the sequence is read cyclically). This study also includes several elegant bijections such as the Prüfer code that sets a bijection between labelled trees on \(n\) vertices and sequences of length \(n - 2\) on an \(n\)-set. With this rich background, the authors venture into answering similar questions for much wider classes of combinatorial objects, though the study mainly pertains to block designs. In the opinion of the reviewer, the subject matter of this book has a high potential of being developed into a fertile area with many interesting results to follows and the authors deserve credit for embarking on this important theme. The book also has a full chapter that contains a number of interesting applications.