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

Constellations and multicontinued fractions: application to Eulerian triangulations

We consider the problem of enumerating planar constellations with two points at a prescribed distance. Our approach relies on a combinatorial correspondence between this family of constellations and the simpler family of rooted constellations, which we may formulate algebraically in terms of multicontinued fractions and generalized Hankel determinants. As an application, we provide a combinatorial derivation of the generating function of Eulerian triangulations with two points at a prescribed distance.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

Planar maps as labeled mobiles

We extend Schaeffer's bijection between rooted quadrangulations and well-labeled trees to the general case of Eulerian planar maps with prescribed face valences, to obtain a bijection with a new class of labeled trees, which we call mobiles. Our bijection covers all the classes of maps previously enumerated by either the two-matrix model used by physicists or by the bijection with blossom trees used by combinatorists. Our bijection reduces the enumeration of maps to that, much simpler, of mobiles and moreover keeps track of the geodesic distance within the initial maps via the mobiles' labels. Generating functions for mobiles are shown to obey systems of algebraic recursion relations.Comment: 31 pages, 17 figures, tex, lanlmac, epsf; improved tex

A generalization of the quadrangulation relation to constellations and hypermaps

Constellations and hypermaps generalize combinatorial maps, i.e. embedding of graphs in a surface, in terms of factorization of permutations. In this paper, we extend a result of Jackson and Visentin (1990) stating an enumerative relation between quadrangulations and bipartite quadrangulations. We show a similar relation between hypermaps and constellations by using a result of Littlewood on factorization of characters. A combinatorial proof of Littlewood's result is also given. Furthermore, we show that coefficients in our relation are all positive integers, hinting possibility of a combinatorial interpretation. Using this enumerative relation, we recover a result on the asymptotic behavior of hypermaps in Chapuy (2009).Comment: 19 pages, extended abstract published in the proceedings of FPSAC 201

A simple formula for the series of constellations and quasi-constellations with boundaries

We obtain a very simple formula for the generating function of bipartite (resp. quasi-bipartite) planar maps with boundaries (holes) of prescribed lengths, which generalizes certain expressions obtained by Eynard in a book to appear. The formula is derived from a bijection due to Bouttier, Di Francesco and Guitter combined with a process (reminiscent of a construction of Pitman) of aggregating connected components of a forest into a single tree. The formula naturally extends to $p$-constellations and quasi-$p$-constellations with boundaries (the case $p=2$ corresponding to bipartite maps).Comment: 23 pages, full paper version of v1, with results extended to constellations and quasi constellation

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

Enumeration of m-ary cacti

The purpose of this paper is to enumerate various classes of cyclically colored m-gonal plane cacti, called m-ary cacti. This combinatorial problem is motivated by the topological classification of complex polynomials having at most m critical values, studied by Zvonkin and others. We obtain explicit formulae for both labelled and unlabelled m-ary cacti, according to i) the number of polygons, ii) the vertex-color distribution, iii) the vertex-degree distribution of each color. We also enumerate m-ary cacti according to the order of their automorphism group. Using a generalization of Otter's formula, we express the species of m-ary cacti in terms of rooted and of pointed cacti. A variant of the m-dimensional Lagrange inversion is then used to enumerate these structures. The method of Liskovets for the enumeration of unrooted planar maps can also be adapted to m-ary cacti.Comment: LaTeX2e, 28 pages, 9 figures (eps), 3 table