112 research outputs found
A simple model of trees for unicellular maps
We consider unicellular maps, or polygon gluings, of fixed genus. A few years
ago the first author gave a recursive bijection transforming unicellular maps
into trees, explaining the presence of Catalan numbers in counting formulas for
these objects. In this paper, we give another bijection that explicitly
describes the "recursive part" of the first bijection. As a result we obtain a
very simple description of unicellular maps as pairs made by a plane tree and a
permutation-like structure. All the previously known formulas follow as an
immediate corollary or easy exercise, thus giving a bijective proof for each of
them, in a unified way. For some of these formulas, this is the first bijective
proof, e.g. the Harer-Zagier recurrence formula, the Lehman-Walsh formula and
the Goupil-Schaeffer formula. We also discuss several applications of our
construction: we obtain a new proof of an identity related to covered maps due
to Bernardi and the first author, and thanks to previous work of the second
author, we give a new expression for Stanley character polynomials, which
evaluate irreducible characters of the symmetric group. Finally, we show that
our techniques apply partially to unicellular 3-constellations and to related
objects that we call quasi-constellations.Comment: v5: minor revision after reviewers comments, 33 pages, added a
refinement by degree of the Harer-Zagier formula and more details in some
proof
Bijective Enumeration of 3-Factorizations of an N-Cycle
This paper is dedicated to the factorizations of the symmetric group.
Introducing a new bijection for partitioned 3-cacti, we derive an el- egant
formula for the number of factorizations of a long cycle into a product of
three permutations. As the most salient aspect, our construction provides the
first purely combinatorial computation of this number
Bijections and symmetries for the factorizations of the long cycle
We study the factorizations of the permutation into factors
of given cycle types. Using representation theory, Jackson obtained for each
an elegant formula for counting these factorizations according to the
number of cycles of each factor. In the cases Schaeffer and Vassilieva
gave a combinatorial proof of Jackson's formula, and Morales and Vassilieva
obtained more refined formulas exhibiting a surprising symmetry property. These
counting results are indicative of a rich combinatorial theory which has
remained elusive to this point, and it is the goal of this article to establish
a series of bijections which unveil some of the combinatorial properties of the
factorizations of into factors for all . We thereby obtain
refinements of Jackson's formulas which extend the cases treated by
Morales and Vassilieva. Our bijections are described in terms of
"constellations", which are graphs embedded in surfaces encoding the transitive
factorizations of permutations
Counting unicellular maps on non-orientable surfaces
A unicellular map is the embedding of a connected graph in a surface in such
a way that the complement of the graph is a topological disk. In this paper we
present a bijective link between unicellular maps on a non-orientable surface
and unicellular maps of a lower topological type, with distinguished vertices.
From that we obtain a recurrence equation that leads to (new) explicit counting
formulas for non-orientable unicellular maps of fixed topology. In particular,
we give exact formulas for the precubic case (all vertices of degree 1 or 3),
and asymptotic formulas for the general case, when the number of edges goes to
infinity. Our strategy is inspired by recent results obtained by the second
author for the orientable case, but significant novelties are introduced: in
particular we construct an involution which, in some sense, "averages" the
effects of non-orientability
Simple recurrence formulas to count maps on orientable surfaces
We establish a simple recurrence formula for the number of rooted
orientable maps counted by edges and genus. We also give a weighted variant for
the generating polynomial where is a parameter taking the number
of faces of the map into account, or equivalently a simple recurrence formula
for the refined numbers that count maps by genus, vertices, and
faces. These formulas give by far the fastest known way of computing these
numbers, or the fixed-genus generating functions, especially for large . In
the very particular case of one-face maps, we recover the Harer-Zagier
recurrence formula.
Our main formula is a consequence of the KP equation for the generating
function of bipartite maps, coupled with a Tutte equation, and it was
apparently unnoticed before. It is similar in look to the one discovered by
Goulden and Jackson for triangulations, and indeed our method to go from the KP
equation to the recurrence formula can be seen as a combinatorial
simplification of Goulden and Jackson's approach (together with one additional
combinatorial trick). All these formulas have a very combinatorial flavour, but
finding a bijective interpretation is currently unsolved.Comment: Version 3: We changed the title once again. We also corrected some
misprints, gave another equivalent formulation of the main result in terms of
vertices and faces (Thm. 5), and added complements on bivariate generating
functions. Version 2: We extended the main result to include the ability to
track the number of faces. The title of the paper has been changed
accordingl
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