On configurations and the book of Sainte-Laguë

AbstractThis paper reports on the mathematical structure of a configuration, defined 120 years ago in 1876 by Th. Reye, and the zeroth book on graph theory, written by A. Sainte-Laguë 70 years ago in 1926, i.e. 10 years earlier than the book of König. In particular, those parts of Sainte-Laguë's book are discussed which are closely related to configurations. In graph-theoretical language configurations are linear regular uniform hypergraphs