Telescoping Sums, Permutations, and First Occurrence Distributions

Telescoping sums very naturally lead to probability distributions on ${\mathbb Z}^+$. But are these distributions typically cosmetic and devoid of motivation? In this paper we give three examples of "first occurrence" distributions, each defined by telescoping sums, and that each arise from concrete questions about the structure of permutations.Comment: 13 page

Universal Cycles of Restricted Words

A connected digraph in which the in-degree of any vertex equals its out-degree is Eulerian, this baseline result is used as the basis of existence proofs for universal cycles (also known as generalized deBruijn cycles or U-cycles) of several combinatorial objects. We extend the body of known results by presenting new results on the existence of universal cycles of monotone, "augmented onto", and Lipschitz functions in addition to universal cycles of certain types of lattice paths and random walks.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figure

Waiting Time Distribution for the Emergence of Superpatterns

Consider a sequence X_1, X_2,... of i.i.d. uniform random variables taking values in the alphabet set {1,2,...,d}. A k-superpattern is a realization of X_1,...,X_t that contains, as an embedded subsequence, each of the non-order-isomorphic subpatterns of length k. We focus on the non-trivial case of d=k=3 and study the waiting time distribution of tau=inf{t>=7: X_1,...,X_t is a superpattern}Comment: 17 page

On Universal Cycles for new Classes of Combinatorial Structures

A universal cycle (u-cycle) is a compact listing of a collection of combinatorial objects. In this paper, we use natural encodings of these objects to show the existence of u-cycles for collections of subsets, matroids, restricted multisets, chains of subsets, multichains, and lattice paths. For subsets, we show that a u-cycle exists for the $k$-subsets of an $n$-set if we let $k$ vary in a non zero length interval. We use this result to construct a "covering" of length $(1+o(1))$$n \choose k$ for all subsets of $[n]$ of size exactly $k$ with a specific formula for the $o(1)$ term. We also show that u-cycles exist for all $n$-length words over some alphabet $\Sigma,$ which contain all characters from $R \subset \Sigma.$ Using this result we provide u-cycles for encodings of Sperner families of size 2 and proper chains of subsets

Maximum Number of Minimum Dominating and Minimum Total Dominating Sets

Given a connected graph with domination (or total domination) number \gamma>=2, we ask for the maximum number m_\gamma and m_{\gamma,T} of dominating and total dominating sets of size \gamma. An exact answer is provided for \gamma=2and lower bounds are given for \gamma>=3.Comment: 6 page