Permutads

We unravel the algebraic structure which controls the various ways of computing the word ((xy)(zt)) and its siblings. We show that it gives rise to a new type of operads, that we call permutads. It turns out that this notion is equivalent to the notion of "shuffle algebra" introduced by the second author. It is also very close to the notion of "shuffle operad" introduced by V. Dotsenko and A. Khoroshkin. It can be seen as a noncommutative version of the notion of nonsymmetric operads. We show that the role of the associahedron in the theory of operads is played by the permutohedron in the theory of permutads.Comment: Same results, re-arranged and more details. 38 page

Partial mixing of semi-random transposition shuffles

We show that for any semi-random transposition shuffle on $n$ cards, the mixing time of any given $k$ cards is at most $n\log k$, provided $k=o((n/\log n)^{1/2})$. In the case of the top-to-random transposition shuffle we show that there is cutoff at this time with a window of size O(n), provided further that $k\to\infty$ as $n\to\infty$ (and no cutoff otherwise). For the random-to-random transposition shuffle we show cutoff at time $(1/2)n\log k$ for the same conditions on $k$. Finally, we analyse the cyclic-to-random transposition shuffle and show partial mixing occurs at time $\le\alpha n\log k$ for some $\alpha$ just larger than 1/2. We prove these results by relating the mixing time of $k$ cards to the mixing of one card. Our results rely heavily on coupling arguments to bound the total variation distance.Comment: 23 pages, 4 figure

Partial Derivative Automaton for Regular Expressions with Shuffle

We generalize the partial derivative automaton to regular expressions with shuffle and study its size in the worst and in the average case. The number of states of the partial derivative automata is in the worst case at most 2^m, where m is the number of letters in the expression, while asymptotically and on average it is no more than (4/3)^m

Operads with compatible CL-shellable partition posets admit a Poincar\'e-Birkhoff-Witt basis

In 2007, Vallette built a bridge across posets and operads by proving that an operad is Koszul if and only if the associated partition posets are Cohen-Macaulay. Both notions of being Koszul and being Cohen-Macaulay admit different refinements: our goal here is to link two of these refinements. We more precisely prove that any (basic-set) operad whose associated posets admit isomorphism-compatible CL-shellings admits a Poincar\'e-Birkhoff-Witt basis. Furthermore, we give counter-examples to the converse