kk-Schur functions and affine Schubert calculus

This book is an exposition of the current state of research of affine Schubert calculus and $k$-Schur functions. This text is based on a series of lectures given at a workshop titled "Affine Schubert Calculus" that took place in July 2010 at the Fields Institute in Toronto, Ontario. The story of this research is told in three parts: 1. Primer on $k$-Schur Functions 2. Stanley symmetric functions and Peterson algebras 3. Affine Schubert calculusComment: 213 pages; conference website: http://www.fields.utoronto.ca/programs/scientific/10-11/schubert/, updates and corrections since v1. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DMS-065264

A Formal Definition for Configuration

There exists a wide set of techniques to perform keyword-based search over relational databases but all of them match the keywords in the users' queries to elements of the databases to be queried as first step. The matching process is a time-consuming and complex task. So, improving the performance of this task is a key issue to improve the keyword based search on relational data sources.In this work, we show how to model the matching process on keyword-based search on relational databases by means of the symmetric group. Besides, how this approach reduces the search space is explained in detail

Combinatorial Variations on Cantor's Diagonal

We discuss counting problems linked to finite versions of Cantor's diagonal of infinite tableaux. We extend previous results of [2] by refining an equivalence relation that reduces significantly the exhaustive generation. New enumerative results follow and allow to look at the sub-class of the so- called bi-Cantorian tableaux. We conclude with a correspondence between Cantorian-type tableaux and coloring of hypergraphs having a square number of vertices

Shifted symmetric functions and multirectangular coordinates of Young diagrams

In this paper, we study shifted Schur functions $S_\mu^\star$, as well as a new family of shifted symmetric functions $\mathfrak{K}_\mu$ linked to Kostka numbers. We prove that both are polynomials in multi-rectangular coordinates, with nonnegative coefficients when written in terms of falling factorials. We then propose a conjectural generalization to the Jack setting. This conjecture is a lifting of Knop and Sahi's positivity result for usual Jack polynomials and resembles recent conjectures of Lassalle. We prove our conjecture for one-part partitions.Comment: 2nd version: minor modifications after referee comment

Asymptotic behavior of some statistics in Ewens random permutations

The purpose of this article is to present a general method to find limiting laws for some renormalized statistics on random permutations. The model considered here is Ewens sampling model, which generalizes uniform random permutations. We describe the asymptotic behavior of a large family of statistics, including the number of occurrences of any given dashed pattern. Our approach is based on the method of moments and relies on the following intuition: two events involving the images of different integers are almost independent.Comment: 32 pages: final version for EJP, produced by the author. An extended abstract of 12 pages, published in the proceedings of AofA 2012, is also available as version