CATBox - the Combinatorial Algorithm Toolbox -- is an interactive course on discrete mathematics to be published by Springer Verlag.

The target audience are undergraduate students in mathematics and computer science, advanced high school students, and students with a minor in either mathematics or computer science at any level. Some of the problems covered are: minimal spanning tree, shortest-path, maximal-flow and both weighted and non-weighted matching problems. In each chapter the problems are motivated by real-world examples. Students learn about different possible solving strategies. This leads to the algorithms, which together with the mathematics they are based upon are rigorously described. The introduction and refinement of the algorithms go hand in hand with experimentation.

CATBox uses Gato - the Graph Animation Toolbox to visualize algorithms on graphs. Gato has been developed at the ZAIK/ZPR, an institute at the Unversity of Cologne. Gato is (c) 1998, 1999 ZAIK/ZPR, Universität zu Köln and distributed under the Gnu Library General Public License. It runs on at least Unix, Linux, MacOS and Windows 95/98/NT.

CATBox has been used for courses on algorithms - both in the Computer Science and the Mathematics department - taught at the University of Cologne. The lecture notes for the course Grundalgorithmen der kombinatorischen Optimierung (summer term 1998) are available (in German only).