1,419 research outputs found
Why Delannoy numbers?
This article is not a research paper, but a little note on the history of
combinatorics: We present here a tentative short biography of Henri Delannoy,
and a survey of his most notable works. This answers to the question raised in
the title, as these works are related to lattice paths enumeration, to the
so-called Delannoy numbers, and were the first general way to solve Ballot-like
problems. These numbers appear in probabilistic game theory, alignments of DNA
sequences, tiling problems, temporal representation models, analysis of
algorithms and combinatorial structures.Comment: Presented to the conference "Lattice Paths Combinatorics and Discrete
Distributions" (Athens, June 5-7, 2002) and to appear in the Journal of
Statistical Planning and Inference
Walks confined in a quadrant are not always D-finite
We consider planar lattice walks that start from a prescribed position, take
their steps in a given finite subset of Z^2, and always stay in the quadrant x
>= 0, y >= 0. We first give a criterion which guarantees that the length
generating function of these walks is D-finite, that is, satisfies a linear
differential equation with polynomial coefficients. This criterion applies,
among others, to the ordinary square lattice walks. Then, we prove that walks
that start from (1,1), take their steps in {(2,-1), (-1,2)} and stay in the
first quadrant have a non-D-finite generating function. Our proof relies on a
functional equation satisfied by this generating function, and on elementary
complex analysis.Comment: To appear in Theoret. Comput. Sci. (special issue devoted to random
generation of combinatorial objects and bijective combinatorics
On Lattice Paths with Marked Patterns: Generating Functions and Multivariate Gaussian Distribution
International audienc
XWeB: the XML Warehouse Benchmark
With the emergence of XML as a standard for representing business data, new
decision support applications are being developed. These XML data warehouses
aim at supporting On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) operations that
manipulate irregular XML data. To ensure feasibility of these new tools,
important performance issues must be addressed. Performance is customarily
assessed with the help of benchmarks. However, decision support benchmarks do
not currently support XML features. In this paper, we introduce the XML
Warehouse Benchmark (XWeB), which aims at filling this gap. XWeB derives from
the relational decision support benchmark TPC-H. It is mainly composed of a
test data warehouse that is based on a unified reference model for XML
warehouses and that features XML-specific structures, and its associate XQuery
decision support workload. XWeB's usage is illustrated by experiments on
several XML database management systems
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