Symmetry and Combinatorial Enumeration in Chemistry

This book is written to introduce a new approach to stereochemical problems and to combinatorial enumerations in chemistry. This approach is based on group the­ ory, but different from conventional ways adopted by most textbooks on chemical group theory. The difference sterns from their starting points: conjugate subgroups and conjugacy classes. The conventional textbooks deal with linear representations and character ta­ bles of point groups. This fact implies that they lay stress on conjugacy classesj in fact, such group characters are determined for the respective conjugacy classes. This approach is versatile, since conjugacy classes can be easily obtained by ex­ amining every element of a group. It is unnecessary to know the group-subgroup relationship of the group, which is not always easy to obtain. The same situa­ tion is true for chemical enumerations, though these are founded on permutation groups. Thus, the P6lya-Redfield theorem (1935 and 1927) uses a cycle index that is composed of terms associated with conjugacy classes.