86,148 research outputs found
Diameters, distortion and eigenvalues
We study the relation between the diameter, the first positive eigenvalue of
the discrete -Laplacian and the -distortion of a finite graph. We
prove an inequality relating these three quantities and apply it to families of
Cayley and Schreier graphs. We also show that the -distortion of Pascal
graphs, approximating the Sierpinski gasket, is bounded, which allows to obtain
estimates for the convergence to zero of the spectral gap as an application of
the main result.Comment: Final version, to appear in the European Journal of Combinatoric
An explicit universal cycle for the (n-1)-permutations of an n-set
We show how to construct an explicit Hamilton cycle in the directed Cayley
graph Cay({\sigma_n, sigma_{n-1}} : \mathbb{S}_n), where \sigma_k = (1 2 >...
k). The existence of such cycles was shown by Jackson (Discrete Mathematics,
149 (1996) 123-129) but the proof only shows that a certain directed graph is
Eulerian, and Knuth (Volume 4 Fascicle 2, Generating All Tuples and
Permutations (2005)) asks for an explicit construction. We show that a simple
recursion describes our Hamilton cycle and that the cycle can be generated by
an iterative algorithm that uses O(n) space. Moreover, the algorithm produces
each successive edge of the cycle in constant time; such algorithms are said to
be loopless
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
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