Encyclopaedia of DesignTheory

Table of contents | Glossary | Topics | Bibliography | History

Introduction

Needless to say, this documentation is also under construction (and probably always will be). Currently we have over 350 glossary entries and 20 topic essays, as well as partial descriptions of 5 classes of designs, a bibliography, and a history page.

Available now: version 2.0 of the External Representation of Block Designs (XML specification and documentation). The library also contains a preprint of a paper describing the project and its wider context.

You may also be interested in the Web page Design Resources, which at present is independent of the DTRS project.

Notes

Accordingly, we welcome comments on the contents, ease of use, or anything else; these should be sent to the editor.

The editor would be very pleased to receive submissions, which will be acknowledged in the Encyclopaedia if they are used. We keep a list of contributors.

Organisation

Selected external Web pages are also indexed here, labelled with this icon: . (External references will open in a new window. Of course, we are not responsible for the availability or the content of external web pages.)

There are many types of designs. For each type, we will give information under the following twelve headings:

• General description: A definition, with an example if possible, and some background.
• Partition structure: Description of the design as a set carrying several partitions (if it exists).
• Incidence structure: Description of the design as a collection of sets with incidence relations (if it exists).
• Array: Description of the design as an array or multi-array (if it exists).
• Experimental design: Use in design of experiments
• Other designs: related designs
• Mathematical properties: such as existence, uniqueness, enumeration, choosing one at random, algebraic representation
• Statistical properties: efficiency, optimality, treatment structure, how to randomise
• In the server: How to find this design in the server
• External references: Descriptions elsewhere on the Net
• Bibliography
• Miscellaneous: not covered elsewhere

B

• Bibliography
• Biographies of design theorists (from the MacTutor History of Mathematics)
• Block designs

C

D

E

• Examples
• Experimental design

F

G

• Glossary

H

• Hadamard matrices
• History

I

J

K

L

• Latin squares

• Matroids
• MOLS (mutually orthogonal Latin squares)

• Nets

P

Q

R

S

• Semi-Latin squares
• SOMAS (simple orthogonal multi-arrays)
• Steiner triple systems

• t-designs
• Topic essays

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

Table of contents | Glossary | Topics | Bibliography | History

Peter J. Cameron
1 December 2004