Given three nonnegative integers $p,q,r$ and a finite field $F$, how many Hankel matrices $left( x_{i+j}right) _{0leq ileq p, 0leq jleq q}$ over $F$ have rank $leq r$ ? This question is classical, and the answer ($q^{2r}$ when $rleqminleft{ p,qright}
$) has been obtained independently by various authors using different tools (Daykin, Elkies, Garcia Armas, Ghorpade and Ram). In this note, we study a refinement of this result: We show that if we fix the first $k$ of the entries $x_{0},x_{1},ldots,x_{k-1}$ for some $kleq rleqminleft{ p,qright} $, then the number of ways to choose the remaining $p+q-k+1$ entries $x_{k},x_{k+1},ldots,x_{p+q}$ such that the resulting Hankel matrix $left( x_{i+j}right) _{0leq ileq p, 0leq jleq q}$ has rank $leq r$ is $q^{2r-k}$. This is exactly the answer that one would expect if the first $k$ entries had no effect on the rank, but of course the situation is not this simple. The refined result generalizes (and provides an alternative proof of) a result by Anzis, Chen, Gao, Kim, Li and Patrias on evaluations of Jacobi-Trudi determinants over finite fields.
We prove an identity for Littlewood--Richardson coefficients conjectured by Pelletier and Ressayre (arXiv:2005.09877). The proof relies on a novel birational involution defined over any semifield.
We study a birational map associated to any finite poset P. This map is a far-reaching generalization (found by Einstein and Propp) of classical rowmotion, which is a certain permutation of the set of order ideals of P. Classical rowmotion has been s
tudied by various authors (Fon-der-Flaass, Cameron, Brouwer, Schrijver, Striker, Williams and many more) under different guises (Striker-Williams promotion and Panyushev complementation are two examples of maps equivalent to it). In contrast, birational rowmotion is new and has yet to reveal several of its mysteries. In this paper, we prove that birational rowmotion has order p+q on the (p, q)-rectangle poset (i.e., on the product of a p-element chain with a q-element chain); we furthermore compute its orders on some triangle-shaped posets and on a class of posets which we call skeletal (this class includes all graded forests). In all cases mentioned, birational rowmotion turns out to have a finite (and explicitly computable) order, a property it does not exhibit for general finite posets (unlike classical rowmotion, which is a permutation of a finite set). Our proof in the case of the rectangle poset uses an idea introduced by Volkov (arXiv:hep-th/0606094) to prove the AA case of the Zamolodchikov periodicity conjecture; in fact, the finite order of birational rowmotion on many posets can be considered an analogue to Zamolodchikov periodicity. We comment on suspected, but so far enigmatic, connections to the theory of root posets. We also make a digression to study classical rowmotion on skeletal posets, since this case has seemingly been overlooked so far.
A subtraction-free definition of the big Witt vector construction was recently given by the first author. This allows one to define the big Witt vectors of any semiring. Here we give an explicit combinatorial description of the big Witt vectors of th
e Boolean semiring. We do the same for two variants of the big Witt vector construction: the Schur Witt vectors and the $p$-typical Witt vectors. We use this to give an explicit description of the Schur Witt vectors of the natural numbers, which can be viewed as the classification of totally positive power series with integral coefficients, first obtained by Davydov. We also determine the cardinalities of some Witt vector algebras with entries in various concrete arithmetic semirings.
