Restricting Dyck Paths and 312-avoiding Permutations

Dyck paths having height at most $h$ and without valleys at height $h-1$ are combinatorially interpreted by means of 312-avoding permutations with some restrictions on their \emph{left-to-right maxima}. The results are obtained by analyzing a restriction of a well-known bijection between the sets of Dyck paths and 312-avoding permutations. We also provide a recursive formula enumerating these two structures using ECO method and the theory of production matrices. As a further result we obtain a family of combinatorial identities involving Catalan numbers

Combinatorial identities associated with new families of the numbers and polynomials and their approximation values

Recently, the numbers $Y_{n}(\lambda )$ and the polynomials $Y_{n}(x,\lambda)$ have been introduced by the second author [22]. The purpose of this paper is to construct higher-order of these numbers and polynomials with their generating functions. By using these generating functions with their functional equations and derivative equations, we derive various identities and relations including two recurrence relations, Vandermonde type convolution formula, combinatorial sums, the Bernstein basis functions, and also some well known families of special numbers and their interpolation functions such as the Apostol--Bernoulli numbers, the Apostol--Euler numbers, the Stirling numbers of the first kind, and the zeta type function. Finally, by using Stirling's approximation for factorials, we investigate some approximation values of the special case of the numbers $Y_{n}\left( \lambda \right)$.Comment: 17 page

Canonical characters on quasi-symmetric functions and bivariate Catalan numbers

Every character on a graded connected Hopf algebra decomposes uniquely as a product of an even character and an odd character (Aguiar, Bergeron, and Sottile, math.CO/0310016). We obtain explicit formulas for the even and odd parts of the universal character on the Hopf algebra of quasi-symmetric functions. They can be described in terms of Legendre's beta function evaluated at half-integers, or in terms of bivariate Catalan numbers: $$C(m,n)=\frac{(2m)!(2n)!}{m!(m+n)!n!}.$$ Properties of characters and of quasi-symmetric functions are then used to derive several interesting identities among bivariate Catalan numbers and in particular among Catalan numbers and central binomial coefficients