This book is written by a mathematician and a theoretical biologist who
have arrived at a good mutual understanding and a well worked-out common
notation. The reader need hardly be convinced of the necessity of such a
mutual understanding, not only for the two investigators, but also for
the sciences they represent. Like Moliere's hero, geneticists are
gradually beginning to understand that, unknowingly, they have been
speaking in the language of cybernetics. Mathematicians are unexpec-
tedly discovering that many past and present problems and methods of
genetics can be naturally formulated in the language of graph theory. In
this way a powerful abstract mathematical theory suddenly finds a
productive application. Moreover, in its turn, such an application be-
gins to "feed" the mathematical theory by presenting it with a number of
new problems. The reader may judge for himself the fruitfulness of such
mutual interaction. At the same time several important circumstances
need to be men- tioned. The formalization and rigorous formulation given
here embraces not only the older problems, known by geneticists for many
decades (the construction of genetic maps, the analysis of
complementation, etc. ), but also comparatively new problems: the
construction of partial com- plementation maps, phylogenetic trees of
proteins, etc.