No Arabic abstract
Chen proposed a conjecture on the log-concavity of the generating function for the symmetric group with respect to the length of longest increasing subsequences of permutations. Motivated by Chens log-concavity conjecture, B{o}na, Lackner and Sagan further studied similar problems by restricting the whole symmetric group to certain of its subsets. They obtained the log-concavity of the corresponding generating functions for these subsets by using the hook-length formula. In this paper, we generalize and prove their results by establishing the Schur positivity of certain symmetric functions. This also enables us to propose a new approach to Chens original conjecture.
A classical result by Schoenberg (1942) identifies all real-valued functions that preserve positive semidefiniteness (psd) when applied entrywise to matrices of arbitrary dimension. Schoenbergs work has continued to attract significant interest, including renewed recent attention due to applications in high-dimensional statistics. However, despite a great deal of effort in the area, an effective characterization of entrywise functions preserving positivity in a fixed dimension remains elusive to date. As a first step, we characterize new classes of polynomials preserving positivity in fixed dimension. The proof of our main result is representation theoretic, and employs Schur polynomials. An alternate, variational approach also leads to several interesting consequences including (a) a hitherto unexplored Schubert cell-type stratification of the cone of psd matrices, (b) new connections between generalized Rayleigh quotients of Hadamard powers and Schur polynomials, and (c) a description of the joint kernels of Hadamard powers.
Cylindric skew Schur functions, a generalization of skew Schur functions, are closely related to the famous problem finding a combinatorial formula for the 3-point Gromov-Witten invariants of Grassmannian. In this paper, we prove cylindric Schur positivity of the cylindric skew Schur functions, conjectured by McNamara. We also show that all coefficients appearing in the expansion are the same as $3$-point Gromov-Witten invariants. We start discussing properties of affine Stanley symmetric functions for general affine permutations and $321$-avoiding affine permutations, and explain how these functions are related to cylindric skew Schur functions. We also provide an effective algorithm to compute the expansion of the cylindric skew Schur functions in terms of the cylindric Schur functions, and the expansion of affine Stanley symmetric functions in terms of affine Schur functions.
In this note, we study the mean length of the longest increasing subsequence of a uniformly sampled involution that avoids the pattern $3412$ and another pattern.
Let $X=(X_i)_{ige 1}$ and $Y=(Y_i)_{ige 1}$ be two sequences of independent and identically distributed (iid) random variables taking their values, uniformly, in a common totally ordered finite alphabet. Let LCI$_n$ be the length of the longest common and (weakly) increasing subsequence of $X_1cdots X_n$ and $Y_1cdots Y_n$. As $n$ grows without bound, and when properly centered and normalized, LCI$_n$ is shown to converge, in distribution, towards a Brownian functional that we identify.
LLT polynomials are $q$-analogues of product of Schur functions that are known to be Schur-positive by Grojnowski and Haiman. However, there is no known combinatorial formula for the coefficients in the Schur expansion. Finding such a formula also provides Schur positivity of Macdonald polynomials. On the other hand, Haiman and Hugland conjectured that LLT polynomials for skew partitions lying on $k$ adjacent diagonals are $k$-Schur positive, which is much stronger than Schur positivity. In this paper, we prove the conjecture for $k=2$ by analyzing unicellular LLT polynomials. We first present a linearity theorem for unicellular LLT polynomials for $k=2$. By analyzing linear relations between LLT polynomials with known results on LLT polynomials for rectangles, we provide the $2$-Schur positivity of the unicellular LLT polynomials as well as LLT polynomials appearing in Haiman-Hugland conjecture for $k=2$.