Some real and unreal enumerative geometry for flag manifolds

We present a general method for constructing real solutions to some problems in enumerative geometry which gives lower bounds on the maximum number of real solutions. We apply this method to show that two new classes of enumerative geometric problems on flag manifolds may have all their solutions be real and modify this method to show that another class may have no real solutions, which is a new phenomenon. This method originated in a numerical homotopy continuation algorithm adapted to the special Schubert calculus on Grassmannians and in principle gives optimal numerical homotopy algorithms for finding explicit solutions to these other enumerative problems.Comment: 19 pages, LaTeX-2e; Updated and final version. To appear in the issue of Michigan Mathematical Journal dedicated to Bill Fulto

Cardinality of Rauzy classes

Rauzy classes define a partition of the set of irreducible (or indecomposable) permutations. They were defined by G. Rauzy as part of an induction algorithm for interval exchange transformations. In this article we prove an explicit formula for the cardinality of all Rauzy classes.Comment: 43 pages, 22 figure

Pattern-Avoiding Involutions: Exact and Asymptotic Enumeration

We consider the enumeration of pattern-avoiding involutions, focusing in particular on sets defined by avoiding a single pattern of length 4. As we demonstrate, the numerical data for these problems demonstrates some surprising behavior. This strange behavior even provides some very unexpected data related to the number of 1324-avoiding permutations