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 by Alexander Schliep and Winfried Hochstättler.

Gato is copyright (c) 1998-2005 Alexander Schliep, and Winfried Hochstättler and copyright (c) 1998-2001 ZAIK/ZPR, an institute at the Unversität zu Köln. Gato is freely available under the LGPL and runs on all plattforms Python and Tcl/Tk run on, which includes at least Unix, Linux, MacOS X and Windows 98, NT, XP.

CATBox has been used for courses on algorithms - both in the Computer Science and the Mathematics departments - at the University of Cologne, at the Technical University Cottbus and the Free University Berlin.

The development is supported by the Fernuniversität Hagen and the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics.