No Arabic abstract
We show that the number of members of S_n avoiding any one of five specific triples of 4-letter patterns is given by sequence A111279 in OEIS, which is known to count weak sorting permutations. By numerical evidence, there are no other (non-trivial) triples of 4-letter patterns giving rise to this sequence. We make use of a variety of methods in proving our result, including recurrences, the kernel method, direct counting, and bijections.
In this paper we present a simple framework to study various distance problems of permutations, including the transposition and block-interchange distance of permutations as well as the reversal distance of signed permutations. These problems are very important in the study of the evolution of genomes. We give a general formulation for lower bounds of the transposition and block-interchange distance from which the existing lower bounds obtained by Bafna and Pevzner, and Christie can be easily derived. As to the reversal distance of signed permutations, we translate it into a block-interchange distance problem of permutations so that we obtain a new lower bound. Furthermore, studying distance problems via our framework motivates several interesting combinatorial problems related to product of permutations, some of which are studied in this paper as well.
Computing the reversal distances of signed permutations is an important topic in Bioinformatics. Recently, a new lower bound for the reversal distance was obtained via the plane permutation framework. This lower bound appears different from the existing lower bound obtained by Bafna and Pevzner through breakpoint graphs. In this paper, we prove that the two lower bounds are equal. Moreover, we confirm a related conjecture on skew-symmetric plane permutations, which can be restated as follows: let $p=(0,-1,-2,ldots -n,n,n-1,ldots 1)$ and let $$ tilde{s}=(0,a_1,a_2,ldots a_n,-a_n,-a_{n-1},ldots -a_1) $$ be any long cycle on the set ${-n,-n+1,ldots 0,1,ldots n}$. Then, $n$ and $a_n$ are always in the same cycle of the product $ptilde{s}$. Furthermore, we show the new lower bound via plane permutations can be interpreted as the topological genera of orientable surfaces associated to signed permutations.
This paper develops an analogy between the cycle structure of, on the one hand, random permutations with cycle lengths restricted to lie in an infinite set $S$ with asymptotic density $sigma$ and, on the other hand, permutations selected according to the Ewens distribution with parameter $sigma$. In particular we show that the asymptotic expected number of cycles of random permutations of $[n]$ with all cycles even, with all cycles odd, and chosen from the Ewens distribution with parameter 1/2 are all ${1 over 2} log n + O(1)$, and the variance is of the same order. Furthermore, we show that in permutations of $[n]$ chosen from the Ewens distribution with parameter $sigma$, the probability of a random element being in a cycle longer than $gamma n$ approaches $(1-gamma)^sigma$ for large $n$. The same limit law holds for permutations with cycles carrying multiplicative weights with average $sigma$. We draw parallels between the Ewens distribution and the asymptotic-density case and explain why these parallels should exist using permutations drawn from weighted Boltzmann distributions.
In this note we investigate correlation inequalities for `up-sets of permutations, in the spirit of the Harris--Kleitman inequality. We focus on two well-studied partial orders on $S_n$, giving rise to differing notions of up-sets. Our first result shows that, under the strong Bruhat order on $S_n$, up-sets are positively correlated (in the Harris--Kleitman sense). Thus, for example, for a (uniformly) random permutation $pi$, the event that no point is displaced by more than a fixed distance $d$ and the event that $pi$ is the product of at most $k$ adjacent transpositions are positively correlated. In contrast, under the weak Bruhat order we show that this completely fails: surprisingly, there are two up-sets each of measure $1/2$ whose intersection has arbitrarily small measure. We also prove analogous correlation results for a class of non-uniform measures, which includes the Mallows measures. Some applications and open problems are discussed.
In this paper we generalize permutations to plane permutations. We employ this framework to derive a combinatorial proof of a result of Zagier and Stanley, that enumerates the number of $n$-cycles $omega$, for which $omega(12cdots n)$ has exactly $k$ cycles. This quantity is $0$, if $n-k$ is odd and $frac{2C(n+1,k)}{n(n+1)}$, otherwise, where $C(n,k)$ is the unsigned Stirling number of the first kind. The proof is facilitated by a natural transposition action on plane permutations which gives rise to various recurrences. Furthermore we study several distance problems of permutations. It turns out that plane permutations allow to study transposition and block-interchange distance of permutations as well as the reversal distance of signed permutations. Novel connections between these different distance problems are established via plane permutations.