• Journal for History of Mathematics
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.125-140
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• 2006

In 1933, I. Schur introduced a Schur ring in connection with permutation group and regular subgroup. After then, it was studied mostly for purely group theoretical purposes. In 1970s, Klin and Poschel initiated its usage in the investigation of graphs, especially for Cayley and circulant graphs. Nowadays it is known that Schur ring is one of the best way to enumerate Cayley graphs. In this paper we study the origin of Schur ring back to 1933 and keep trace its evolution to graph theory and combinatorics.