Touchard-Riordan formulas, T-fractions, and Jacobi's triple product identity

Touchard-Riordan-like formulas are some expressions appearing in enumeration problems and as moments of orthogonal polynomials. We begin this article with a new combinatorial approach to prove these kind of formulas, related with integer partitions. This gives a new perspective on the original result of Touchard and Riordan. But the main goal is to give a combinatorial proof of a Touchard-Riordan--like formula for q-secant numbers discovered by the first author. An interesting limit case of these objects can be directly interpreted in terms of partitions, so that we obtain a connection between the formula for q-secant numbers, and a particular case of Jacobi's triple product identity. Building on this particular case, we obtain a "finite version" of the triple product identity. It is in the form of a finite sum which is given a combinatorial meaning, so that the triple product identity can be obtained by taking the limit. Here the proof is non-combinatorial and relies on a functional equation satisfied by a T-fraction. Then from this result on the triple product identity, we derive a whole new family of Touchard-Riordan--like formulas whose combinatorics is not yet understood. Eventually, we prove a Touchard-Riordan--like formula for a q-analog of Genocchi numbers, which is related with Jacobi's identity for (q;q)^3 rather than the triple product identity.Comment: 29 page

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

Approximations for the Moments of Nonstationary and State Dependent Birth-Death Queues

In this paper we propose a new method for approximating the nonstationary moment dynamics of one dimensional Markovian birth-death processes. By expanding the transition probabilities of the Markov process in terms of Poisson-Charlier polynomials, we are able to estimate any moment of the Markov process even though the system of moment equations may not be closed. Using new weighted discrete Sobolev spaces, we derive explicit error bounds of the transition probabilities and new weak a priori estimates for approximating the moments of the Markov processs using a truncated form of the expansion. Using our error bounds and estimates, we are able to show that our approximations converge to the true stochastic process as we add more terms to the expansion and give explicit bounds on the truncation error. As a result, we are the first paper in the queueing literature to provide error bounds and estimates on the performance of a moment closure approximation. Lastly, we perform several numerical experiments for some important models in the queueing theory literature and show that our expansion techniques are accurate at estimating the moment dynamics of these Markov process with only a few terms of the expansion