Descent sets on 321-avoiding involutions and hook decompositions of partitions

We show that the distribution of the major index over the set of involutions in S_n that avoid the pattern 321 is given by the q-analogue of the n-th central binomial coefficient. The proof consists of a composition of three non-trivial bijections, one being the Robinson-Schensted correspondence, ultimately mapping those involutions with major index m into partitions of m whose Young diagram fits inside an n/2 by n/2 box. We also obtain a refinement that keeps track of the descent set, and we deduce an analogous result for the comajor index of 123-avoiding involutions

Enumeration of Standard Young Tableaux

A survey paper, to appear as a chapter in a forthcoming Handbook on Enumeration.Comment: 65 pages, small correction

Euler-Mahonian Statistics On Ordered Set Partitions (II)

We study statistics on ordered set partitions whose generating functions are related to $p,q$-Stirling numbers of the second kind. The main purpose of this paper is to provide bijective proofs of all the conjectures of \stein (Arxiv:math.CO/0605670). Our basic idea is to encode ordered partitions by a kind of path diagrams and explore the rich combinatorial properties of the latter structure. We also give a partition version of MacMahon's theorem on the equidistribution of the statistics inversion number and major index on words.Comment: 27 pages,8 figure

The excedances and descents of bi-increasing permutations

Starting from some considerations we make about the relations between certain difference statistics and the classical permutation statistics we study permutations whose inversion number and excedance difference coincide. It turns out that these (so-called bi-increasing) permutations are just the 321-avoiding ones. The paper investigates their excedance and descent structure. In particular, we find some nice combinatorial interpretations for the distribution coefficients of the number of excedances and descents, respectively, and their difference analogues over the bi-increasing permutations in terms of parallelogram polyominoes and 2-Motzkin paths. This yields a connection between restricted permutations, parallelogram polyominoes, and lattice paths that reveals the relations between several well-known bijections given for these objects (e.g. by Delest-Viennot, Billey-Jockusch-Stanley, Francon-Viennot, and Foata-Zeilberger). As an application, we enumerate skew diagrams according to their rank and give a simple combinatorial proof for a result concerning the symmetry of the joint distribution of the number of excedances and inversions, respectively, over the symmetric group.Comment: 36 page

Three dimensional Narayana and Schröder numbers

AbstractConsider the 3-dimensional lattice paths running from (0,0,0) to (n,n,n), constrained to the region {(x,y,z):0⩽x⩽y⩽z}, and using various step sets. With C(3,n) denoting the set of constrained paths using the steps X≔(1,0,0), Y≔(0,1,0), and Z≔(0,0,1), we consider the statistic counting descents on a path P=p1p2…p3n∈C(3,n), i.e., des(P)≔|{i:pipi+1∈{YX,ZX,ZY},1⩽i⩽3n-1}|. A combinatorial cancellation argument and a result of MacMahon yield a formula for the 3-Narayana number, N(3,n,k)≔|{P∈C(3,n):des(P)=k+2}|. We define other statistics distributed by the 3-Narayana number and show that 4∑k2kN(3,n,k) yields the nth large 3-Schröder number which counts the constrained paths using the seven positive steps of the form (ξ1,ξ2,ξ3), ξi∈{0,1}

Proof of a conjectured q,t-Schr\"{o}der identity

A conjecture of Chunwei Song on a limiting case of the q,t-Schr\"{o}der theorem is proved combinatorially. The proof matches pairs of tableaux to Catalan words in a manner that preserves differences in the maj statistic.Comment: 8 pages; v2 corrects presentation error in example and notation (substance of proof unchanged