Old and young leaves on plane trees

A leaf of a plane tree is called an old leaf if it is the leftmost child of its parent, and it is called a young leaf otherwise. In this paper we enumerate plane trees with a given number of old leaves and young leaves. The formula is obtained combinatorially by presenting two bijections between plane trees and 2-Motzkin paths which map young leaves to red horizontal steps, and old leaves to up steps plus one. We derive some implications to the enumeration of restricted permutations with respect to certain statistics such as pairs of consecutive deficiencies, double descents, and ascending runs. Finally, our main bijection is applied to obtain refinements of two identities of Coker, involving refined Narayana numbers and the Catalan numbers.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure

Path counting and random matrix theory

We establish three identities involving Dyck paths and alternating Motzkin paths, whose proofs are based on variants of the same bijection. We interpret these identities in terms of closed random walks on the halfline. We explain how these identities arise from combinatorial interpretations of certain properties of the $\beta$-Hermite and $\beta$-Laguerre ensembles of random matrix theory. We conclude by presenting two other identities obtained in the same way, for which finding combinatorial proofs is an open problem.Comment: 14 pages, 13 figures and diagrams; submitted to the Electronic Journal of Combinatoric

Crossings, Motzkin paths and Moments

Kasraoui, Stanton and Zeng, and Kim, Stanton and Zeng introduced certain $q$-analogues of Laguerre and Charlier polynomials. The moments of these orthogonal polynomials have combinatorial models in terms of crossings in permutations and set partitions. The aim of this article is to prove simple formulas for the moments of the $q$-Laguerre and the $q$-Charlier polynomials, in the style of the Touchard-Riordan formula (which gives the moments of some $q$-Hermite polynomials, and also the distribution of crossings in matchings). Our method mainly consists in the enumeration of weighted Motzkin paths, which are naturally associated with the moments. Some steps are bijective, in particular we describe a decomposition of paths which generalises a previous construction of Penaud for the case of the Touchard-Riordan formula. There are also some non-bijective steps using basic hypergeometric series, and continued fractions or, alternatively, functional equations.Comment: 21 page

Noncommutative integrability, paths and quasi-determinants

In previous work, we showed that the solution of certain systems of discrete integrable equations, notably $Q$ and $T$-systems, is given in terms of partition functions of positively weighted paths, thereby proving the positive Laurent phenomenon of Fomin and Zelevinsky for these cases. This method of solution is amenable to generalization to non-commutative weighted paths. Under certain circumstances, these describe solutions of discrete evolution equations in non-commutative variables: Examples are the corresponding quantum cluster algebras [BZ], the Kontsevich evolution [DFK09b] and the $T$-systems themselves [DFK09a]. In this paper, we formulate certain non-commutative integrable evolutions by considering paths with non-commutative weights, together with an evolution of the weights that reduces to cluster algebra mutations in the commutative limit. The general weights are expressed as Laurent monomials of quasi-determinants of path partition functions, allowing for a non-commutative version of the positive Laurent phenomenon. We apply this construction to the known systems, and obtain Laurent positivity results for their solutions in terms of initial data.Comment: 46 pages, minor typos correcte

Chebyshev type lattice path weight polynomials by a constant term method

We prove a constant term theorem which is useful for finding weight polynomials for Ballot/Motzkin paths in a strip with a fixed number of arbitrary `decorated' weights as well as an arbitrary `background' weight. Our CT theorem, like Viennot's lattice path theorem from which it is derived primarily by a change of variable lemma, is expressed in terms of orthogonal polynomials which in our applications of interest often turn out to be non-classical. Hence we also present an efficient method for finding explicit closed form polynomial expressions for these non-classical orthogonal polynomials. Our method for finding the closed form polynomial expressions relies on simple combinatorial manipulations of Viennot's diagrammatic representation for orthogonal polynomials. In the course of the paper we also provide a new proof of Viennot's original orthogonal polynomial lattice path theorem. The new proof is of interest because it uses diagonalization of the transfer matrix, but gets around difficulties that have arisen in past attempts to use this approach. In particular we show how to sum over a set of implicitly defined zeros of a given orthogonal polynomial, either by using properties of residues or by using partial fractions. We conclude by applying the method to two lattice path problems important in the study of polymer physics as models of steric stabilization and sensitized flocculation.Comment: 27 pages, 14 figure