10,074 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
Part-products of -restricted integer compositions
If is a cofinite set of positive integers, an "-restricted composition
of " is a sequence of elements of , denoted
, whose sum is . For uniform random
-restricted compositions, the random variable is asymptotically lognormal. The proof is
based upon a combinatorial technique for decomposing a composition into a
sequence of smaller compositions.Comment: 18 page
Directed Hamiltonicity and Out-Branchings via Generalized Laplacians
We are motivated by a tantalizing open question in exact algorithms: can we
detect whether an -vertex directed graph has a Hamiltonian cycle in time
significantly less than ? We present new randomized algorithms that
improve upon several previous works:
1. We show that for any constant and prime we can count the
Hamiltonian cycles modulo in
expected time less than for a constant that depends only on and
. Such an algorithm was previously known only for the case of counting
modulo two [Bj\"orklund and Husfeldt, FOCS 2013].
2. We show that we can detect a Hamiltonian cycle in
time and polynomial space, where is the size of the maximum
independent set in . In particular, this yields an time
algorithm for bipartite directed graphs, which is faster than the
exponential-space algorithm in [Cygan et al., STOC 2013].
Our algorithms are based on the algebraic combinatorics of "incidence
assignments" that we can capture through evaluation of determinants of
Laplacian-like matrices, inspired by the Matrix--Tree Theorem for directed
graphs. In addition to the novel algorithms for directed Hamiltonicity, we use
the Matrix--Tree Theorem to derive simple algebraic algorithms for detecting
out-branchings. Specifically, we give an -time randomized algorithm
for detecting out-branchings with at least internal vertices, improving
upon the algorithms of [Zehavi, ESA 2015] and [Bj\"orklund et al., ICALP 2015].
We also present an algebraic algorithm for the directed -Leaf problem, based
on a non-standard monomial detection problem
Hopf algebras and Markov chains: Two examples and a theory
The operation of squaring (coproduct followed by product) in a combinatorial
Hopf algebra is shown to induce a Markov chain in natural bases. Chains
constructed in this way include widely studied methods of card shuffling, a
natural "rock-breaking" process, and Markov chains on simplicial complexes.
Many of these chains can be explictly diagonalized using the primitive elements
of the algebra and the combinatorics of the free Lie algebra. For card
shuffling, this gives an explicit description of the eigenvectors. For
rock-breaking, an explicit description of the quasi-stationary distribution and
sharp rates to absorption follow.Comment: 51 pages, 17 figures. (Typographical errors corrected. Further fixes
will only appear on the version on Amy Pang's website, the arXiv version will
not be updated.
History of Catalan numbers
We give a brief history of Catalan numbers, from their first discovery in the
18th century to modern times. This note will appear as an appendix in Richard
Stanley's forthcoming book on Catalan numbers.Comment: 10 page
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