Richard Stanley through a crystal lens and from a random angle

We review Stanley's seminal work on the number of reduced words of the longest element of the symmetric group and his Stanley symmetric functions. We shed new light on this by giving a crystal theoretic interpretation in terms of decreasing factorizations of permutations. Whereas crystal operators on tableaux are coplactic operators, the crystal operators on decreasing factorization intertwine with the Edelman-Greene insertion. We also view this from a random perspective and study a Markov chain on reduced words of the longest element in a finite Coxeter group, in particular the symmetric group, and mention a generalization to a poset setting.Comment: 11 pages; 3 figures; v2 updated references and added discussion on Coxeter-Knuth grap

Skew Schubert functions and the Pieri formula for flag manifolds

We show the equivalence of the Pieri formula for flag manifolds and certain identities among the structure constants, giving new proofs of both the Pieri formula and of these identities. A key step is the association of a symmetric function to a finite poset with labeled Hasse diagram satisfying a symmetry condition. This gives a unified definition of skew Schur functions, Stanley symmetric function, and skew Schubert functions (defined here). We also use algebraic geometry to show the coefficient of a monomial in a Schubert polynomial counts certain chains in the Bruhat order, obtaining a new combinatorial construction of Schubert polynomials.Comment: 24 pages, LaTeX 2e, with epsf.st

Crystal analysis of type CC Stanley symmetric functions

Combining results of T.K. Lam and J. Stembridge, the type $C$ Stanley symmetric function $F_w^C(\mathbf{x})$, indexed by an element $w$ in the type $C$ Coxeter group, has a nonnegative integer expansion in terms of Schur functions. We provide a crystal theoretic explanation of this fact and give an explicit combinatorial description of the coefficients in the Schur expansion in terms of highest weight crystal elements.Comment: 39 page

Coxeter-Knuth graphs and a signed Little map for type B reduced words

We define an analog of David Little's algorithm for reduced words in type B, and investigate its main properties. In particular, we show that our algorithm preserves the recording tableau of Kra\'{s}kiewicz insertion, and that it provides a bijective realization of the Type B transition equations in Schubert calculus. Many other aspects of type A theory carry over to this new setting. Our primary tool is a shifted version of the dual equivalence graphs defined by Assaf and further developed by Roberts. We provide an axiomatic characterization of shifted dual equivalence graphs, and use them to prove a structure theorem for the graph of Type B Coxeter-Knuth relations.Comment: 41 pages, 10 figures, many improvements from version 1, substantively the same as the version in Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, Vol 21, Issue