No Arabic abstract
Creation operators act on symmetric functions to build Schur functions, Hall--Littlewood polynomials, and related symmetric functions one row at a time. Haglund, Morse, Zabrocki, and others have studied more general symmetric functions $H_{alpha}$, $C_{alpha}$, and $B_{alpha}$ obtained by applying any sequence of creation operators to $1$. We develop new combinatorial models for the Schur expansions of these and related symmetric functions using objects called abacus-histories. These formulas arise by chaining together smaller abacus-histories that encode the effect of an individual creation operator on a given Schur function. We give a similar treatment for operators such as multiplication by $h_m$, $h_m^{perp}$, $omega$, etc., which serve as building blocks to construct the creation operators. We use involutions on abacus-histories to give bijective proofs of properties of the Bernstein creation operator and Hall-Littlewood polynomials indexed by three-row partitions.
Background: We study the sparsification of dynamic programming folding algorithms of RNA structures. Sparsification applies to the mfe-folding of RNA structures and can lead to a significant reduction of time complexity. Results: We analyze the sparsification of a particular decomposition rule, $Lambda^*$, that splits an interval for RNA secondary and pseudoknot structures of fixed topological genus. Essential for quantifying the sparsification is the size of its so called candidate set. We present a combinatorial framework which allows by means of probabilities of irreducible substructures to obtain the expected size of the set of $Lambda^*$-candidates. We compute these expectations for arc-based energy models via energy-filtered generating functions (GF) for RNA secondary structures as well as RNA pseudoknot structures. For RNA secondary structures we also consider a simplified loop-energy model. This combinatorial analysis is then compared to the expected number of $Lambda^*$-candidates obtained from folding mfe-structures. In case of the mfe-folding of RNA secondary structures with a simplified loop energy model our results imply that sparsification provides a reduction of time complexity by a constant factor of 91% (theory) versus a 96% reduction (experiment). For the full loop-energy model there is a reduction of 98% (experiment).
We give a brief overview of the life and combinatorics of Jeff Remmel, a mathematician with successful careers in both logic and combinatorics.
We give a geometric realization of the polyhedra governed by the structure of associative algebras with co-inner products, or more precisely, governed by directed planar trees. Our explicit realization of these polyhedra, which include the associahedra in a special case, shows in particular that these polyhedra are homeomorphic to balls. We also calculate the number of vertices of the lowest generalized associahedra, giving appropriate generalizations of the Catalan numbers.
The finite colliding bullets problem is the following simple problem: consider a gun, whose barrel remains in a fixed direction; let $(V_i)_{1le ile n}$ be an i.i.d. family of random variables with uniform distribution on $[0,1]$; shoot $n$ bullets one after another at times $1,2,dots, n$, where the $i$th bullet has speed $V_i$. When two bullets collide, they both annihilate. We give the distribution of the number of surviving bullets, and in some generalisation of this model. While the distribution is relatively simple (and we found a number of bold claims online), our proof is surprisingly intricate and mixes combinatorial and geometric arguments; we argue that any rigorous argument must very likely be rather elaborate.
A graphical design is a proper subset of vertices of a graph on which many eigenfunctions of the Laplacian operator have mean value zero. In this paper, we show that extremal independent sets make extremal graphical designs, that is, a design on which the maximum possible number of eigenfunctions have mean value zero. We then provide examples of such graphs and sets, which arise naturally in extremal combinatorics. We also show that sets which realize the isoperimetric constant of a graph make extremal graphical designs, and provide examples for them as well. We investigate the behavior of graphical designs under the operation of weak graph product. In addition, we present a family of extremal graphical designs for the hypercube graph.