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

The generating function of planar Eulerian orientations

37 pp.International audienceThe enumeration of planar maps equipped with an Eulerian orientation has attracted attention in both combinatorics and theoretical physics since at least 2000. The case of 4-valent maps is particularly interesting: these orientations are in bijection with properly 3-coloured quadrangulations, while in physics they correspond to configurations of the ice model.We solve both problems -- namely the enumeration of planarEulerian orientations and of 4-valent planar Eulerian orientations --by expressing the associated generating functions as the inverses (for the composition of series) of simple hypergeometric series. Using these expressions, we derive the asymptotic behaviour of the number of planar Eulerian orientations, thus proving earlier predictions of Kostov, Zinn-Justin, Elvey Price and Guttmann. This behaviour, $\mu^n /(n \log n)^2$, prevents the associated generating functions from being D-finite. Still, these generating functions are differentially algebraic, as they satisfy non-linear differential equations of order 2. Differential algebraicity has recently been proved for other map problems, in particular for maps equipped with a Potts model.Our solutions mix recursive and bijective ingredients. In particular, a preliminary bijection transforms our oriented maps into maps carrying a height function on their vertices.In the 4-valent case, we also observe an unexpected connection with theenumeration of maps equipped with a spanning tree that is internallyinactive in the sense of Tutte. This connection remains to beexplained combinatorially

Asymptotics of Minimal Deterministic Finite Automata Recognizing a Finite Binary Language

We show that the number of minimal deterministic finite automata with n+1 states recognizing a finite binary language grows asymptotically for n ? ? like ?(n! 8? e^{3 a? n^{1/3}} n^{7/8}), where a? ? -2.338 is the largest root of the Airy function. For this purpose, we use a new asymptotic enumeration method proposed by the same authors in a recent preprint (2019). We first derive a new two-parameter recurrence relation for the number of such automata up to a given size. Using this result, we prove by induction tight bounds that are sufficiently accurate for large n to determine the asymptotic form using adapted Netwon polygons