Upper bounds for the Stanley-Wilf limit of 1324 and other layered patterns

We prove that the Stanley-Wilf limit of any layered permutation pattern of length $\ell$ is at most $4\ell^2$, and that the Stanley-Wilf limit of the pattern 1324 is at most 16. These bounds follow from a more general result showing that a permutation avoiding a pattern of a special form is a merge of two permutations, each of which avoids a smaller pattern. If the conjecture is true that the maximum Stanley-Wilf limit for patterns of length $\ell$ is attained by a layered pattern then this implies an upper bound of $4\ell^2$ for the Stanley-Wilf limit of any pattern of length $\ell$. We also conjecture that, for any $k\ge 0$, the set of 1324-avoiding permutations with $k$ inversions contains at least as many permutations of length $n+1$ as those of length $n$. We show that if this is true then the Stanley-Wilf limit for 1324 is at most $e^{\pi\sqrt{2/3}} \simeq 13.001954$

Some open problems on permutation patterns

This is a brief survey of some open problems on permutation patterns, with an emphasis on subjects not covered in the recent book by Kitaev, \emph{Patterns in Permutations and words}. I first survey recent developments on the enumeration and asymptotics of the pattern 1324, the last pattern of length 4 whose asymptotic growth is unknown, and related issues such as upper bounds for the number of avoiders of any pattern of length $k$ for any given $k$. Other subjects treated are the M\"obius function, topological properties and other algebraic aspects of the poset of permutations, ordered by containment, and also the study of growth rates of permutation classes, which are containment closed subsets of this poset.Comment: 20 pages. Related to upcoming talk at the British Combinatorial Conference 2013. To appear in London Mathematical Society Lecture Note Serie

Staircases, dominoes, and the growth rate of 1324-avoiders

We establish a lower bound of 10.271 for the growth rate of the permutations avoiding 1324, and an upper bound of 13.5. This is done by first finding the precise growth rate of a subclass whose enumeration is related to West-2-stack-sortable permutations, and then combining copies of this subclass in particular ways

On the Wilf-Stanley limit of 4231-avoiding permutations and a conjecture of Arratia

We construct a sequence of finite automata that accept subclasses of the class of 4231-avoiding permutations. We thereby show that the Wilf-Stanley limit for the class of 4231-avoiding permutations is bounded below by 9.35. This bound shows that this class has the largest such limit among all classes of permutations avoiding a single permutation of length 4 and refutes the conjecture that the Wilf-Stanley limit of a class of permutations avoiding a single permutation of length k cannot exceed (k-1)^2.Comment: Submitted to Advances in Applied Mathematic

Pattern-Avoiding Involutions: Exact and Asymptotic Enumeration

We consider the enumeration of pattern-avoiding involutions, focusing in particular on sets defined by avoiding a single pattern of length 4. As we demonstrate, the numerical data for these problems demonstrates some surprising behavior. This strange behavior even provides some very unexpected data related to the number of 1324-avoiding permutations