ABSTRACT

In 1927, a mathematician, Redfield, wrote the only paper he ever published [45], though the paper was completely overlooked because of its abstruse language. A paper published jointly by a chemist, Lunn, and a mathematidaa, Senior, made use of the mathematical theory of permutation groups [46]. These three papers foreshadowed the fundamental work of George Pôlya, an Hungaiian-bmn American mathematician, who in 1935-1937 produced a series of papers which are fundamental in both mathematics and chemistry [47]. Pôlya’s fundamental theorem will be discussed in detail in a later section.