Pragmatism beats Historicism in our day and age

摘要

I am holding the new 2020 edition of "Chromatic Graph Theory" by Gary Chartrand and Zhang Ping. It is about the same in volume as the first 2009 edition CZ: 503 pp. instead of 483 - a meager growth of 20 pages over the course of 11 years. The first edition is dedicated "To Frank Harary (1921 -2005) for inspiring so many, including us, to look for the beauty in graph theory." Imagine, in the 2020 edition Chartrand and Ping give Harary a boot and dedicate the book "To Ralph Stanton"！ It is the first encounter for me when the dedication for "beauty" is withdrawn in the second edition of essentially the same book. Pragmatism beats historicism.