9,258 research outputs found
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
A Characterization of Uniquely Representable Graphs
The betweenness structure of a finite metric space is a pair
where is the so-called betweenness
relation of that consists of point triplets such that . The underlying graph of a betweenness structure
is the simple graph where
the edges are pairs of distinct points with no third point between them. A
connected graph is uniquely representable if there exists a unique metric
betweenness structure with underlying graph . It was implied by previous
works that trees are uniquely representable. In this paper, we give a
characterization of uniquely representable graphs by showing that they are
exactly the block graphs. Further, we prove that two related classes of graphs
coincide with the class of block graphs and the class of distance-hereditary
graphs, respectively. We show that our results hold not only for metric but
also for almost-metric betweenness structures.Comment: 16 pages (without references); 3 figures; major changes: simplified
proofs, improved notations and namings, short overview of metric graph theor
Sylvester: Ushering in the Modern Era of Research on Odd Perfect Numbers
In 1888, James Joseph Sylvester (1814-1897) published a series of papers that he hoped would pave the way for a general proof of the nonexistence of an odd perfect number (OPN). Seemingly unaware that more than fifty years earlier Benjamin Peirce had proved that an odd perfect number must have at least four distinct prime divisors, Sylvester began his fundamental assault on the problem by establishing the same result. Later that same year, he strengthened his conclusion to five. These findings would help to mark the beginning of the modern era of research on odd perfect numbers. Sylvester\u27s bound stood as the best demonstrated until Gradstein improved it by one in 1925. Today, we know that the number of distinct prime divisors that an odd perfect number can have is at least eight. This was demonstrated by Chein in 1979 in his doctoral thesis. However, he published nothing of it. A complete proof consisting of almost 200 manuscript pages was given independently by Hagis. An outline of it appeared in 1980.
What motivated Sylvester\u27s sudden interest in odd perfect numbers? Moreover, we also ask what prompted this mathematician who was primarily noted for his work in algebra to periodically direct his attention to famous unsolved problems in number theory? The objective of this paper is to formulate a response to these questions, as well as to substantiate the assertion that much of the modern work done on the subject of odd perfect numbers has as it roots, the series of papers produced by Sylvester in 1888
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
Problems and memories
I state some open problems coming from joint work with Paul Erd\H{o}sComment: This is a paper form of the talk I gave on July 5, 2013 at the
centennial conference in Budapest to honor Paul Erd\H{o}
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