Some determinants of path generating functions

We evaluate four families of determinants of matrices, where the entries are sums or differences of generating functions for paths consisting of up-steps, down-steps and level steps. By specialisation, these determinant evaluations have numerous corollaries. In particular, they cover numerous determinant evaluations of combinatorial numbers - most notably of Catalan, ballot, and of Motzkin numbers - that appeared previously in the literature.Comment: 35 pages, AmS-TeX; minor corrections; final version to appear in Adv. Appl. Mat

Eulerian quasisymmetric functions and cyclic sieving

It is shown that a refined version of a q-analogue of the Eulerian numbers together with the action, by conjugation, of the subgroup of the symmetric group $S_n$ generated by the $n$-cycle $(1,2,...,n)$ on the set of permutations of fixed cycle type and fixed number of excedances provides an instance of the cyclic sieving phenonmenon of Reiner, Stanton and White. The main tool is a class of symmetric functions recently introduced in work of two of the authors.Comment: 30 page