We review the Green/Kleitman/Leeb interpretation of de Bruijn's symmetric chain decomposition of ${\cal B}_{n}$, and explain how it can be used to find a maximal collection of disjoint symmetric chains in the nonsymmetric lattice of partitions of a set.
In 1979, Shearer and Kleitman conjectured that there exist $\lfloor n/2 \rfloor+1$ orthogonal chain decompositions of the hypercube $Q_n$, and constructed two orthogonal chain decompositions. In this paper, we make the first non-trivial progress on this conjecture since by constructing three orthogonal chain decompositions of $Q_n$ for $n$ large enough. To do this, we introduce the notion of "almost orthogonal symmetric chain decompositions". We explicitly describe three such decompositions of $Q_5$ and $Q_7$, and describe conditions which allow us to decompose products of hypercubes into $k$ …
We ask if there exists a symmetric chain decomposition of the cuboid $Q_k \times n$ such that no chain is "taut", i.e. no chain has a subchain of the form $(a_1,\ldots, a_k,0)\prec \ldots\prec (a_1,\ldots,a_k,n-1)$. In this paper, we show this is true precisely when $k \ge 5$ and $n\ge 3$. This question arises naturally when considering products of symmetric chain decompositions which induce orthogonal chain decompositions --- the existence of the decompositions provided in this paper unexpectedly resolves the most difficult case of previous work by the second author on almost orthogonal symme…
Subgroups of the symmetric group $S_n$ act on powers of chains $C^n$ by permuting coordinates, and induce automorphisms of the ordered sets $C^n$. The quotients defined are candidates for symmetric chain decompositions. We establish this for some families of groups in order to enlarge the collection of subgroups $G$ of the symmetric group $S_n$ for which the quotient $B_n/G$ obtained from the $G$-orbits on the Boolean lattice $B_n$ is a symmetric chain order. The methods are also used to provide an elementary proof that quotients of powers of SCOs by cyclic groups are SCOs.
In their study of a quartic integral, Boros and Moll introduced a special case of Jacobi polynomials, which are now known as the Boros-Moll polynomials. In this paper, we study a symmetric decomposition of Boros-Moll polynomials. We discover that both of the polynomials in the symmetric decomposition are alternatingly gamma-positive polynomials.
A Hamilton decomposition of a graph is a partitioning of its edge set into disjoint spanning cycles. The existence of such decompositions is known for all hypercubes of even dimension $2n$. We give a decomposition for the case $n = 2^a3^b$ that is highly symmetric in the sense that every cycle can be derived from every other cycle just by permuting the axes. We conjecture that a similar decomposition exists for every n.
A brief introduction to the theory of ordered sets and lattice theory is given. To illustrate proof techniques in the theory of ordered sets, a generalization of a conjecture of Daykin and Daykin, concerning the structure of posets that can be partitioned into chains in a ``strong'' way, is proved. The result is motivated by a conjecture of Graham's concerning probability correlation inequalities for linear extensions of finite posets.
We examine a result of Basor and Ehrhardt concerning Hankel and Toeplitz plus Hankel matrices, within the context of the Riordan group of lower-triangular matrices. This allows us to determine the LDU decomposition of certain symmetric Toeplitz plus Hankel matrices. We also determine the generating functions and Hankel transforms of associated sequences.
Polynomials which afford nonnegative, real-rooted symmetric decompositions have been investigated recently in algebraic, enumerative and geometric combinatorics. Brändén and Solus have given sufficient conditions under which the image of a polynomial under a certain operator associated to barycentric subdivision has such a decomposition. This paper gives a new proof of their result which generalizes to subdivision operators in the setting of uniform triangulations of simplicial complexes, introduced by the first named author. Sufficient conditions under which these decompositions are also inte…
We create a framework for studying symmetric chain decompositions of families of finite posets based on the geometry of polytopes. Our framework unifies almost all known results regarding symmetric chain decompositions of the Young posets $L(m,n)$ --- arising as cells in the Bruhat decomposition of quotients of $SL_{m+n+1}$ --- and yields unexpected new results. The methods we provide are geometric in nature, systematic, and totally amenable to human analysis. This allows us to discover new phenomena which are impenetrable to casework and brute force computer search. In particular, our method …
A poset is called a symmetric chain decomposition if the poset can be expressed as a disjoint union of symmetric chains. For positive integers $m$ and $n$, let $N(m,n)$ denote the set of all compositions $α=(α_1,\cdots,α_m)$, with $0\le α_i \le n$ for each $i=1,\cdots,m$. Define order $<$ as follow, $\forall α,β\in N(m,n)$, $β< α$ if and only if $β_i \le α_i(i=1,\cdots,m)$ and $\sum\limits_{i=1}^{m}β_i <\sum\limits_{i=1}^{m}α_i$. In this paper, we show that the poset $(N(m,n),<)$ can be expressed as a disjoint of symmetric chains by constructive method.
Young's lattice $L(m,n)$ consists of partitions having $m$ parts of size at most $n$, ordered by inclusion of the corresponding Ferrers diagrams. K. O'Hara gave the first constructive proof of the unimodality of the Gaussian polynomials by expressing the underlying ranked set of $L(m,n)$ as a disjoint union of products of centered rank-unimodal subsets. We construct a finer decomposition which is compatible with the partial order on Young's lattice, at the cost of replacing the cartesian product with a more general poset extension. As a corollary, we obtain an explicit chain decomposition whic…
For any positive integer $m$, the complete graph on $2^{2m}(2^m+2)$ vertices is decomposed into $2^m+1$ commuting strongly regular graphs, which give rise to a symmetric association scheme of class $2^{m+2}-2$. Furthermore, the eigenmatrices of the symmetric association schemes are determined explicitly. As an application, the eigenmatrix of the commutative strongly regular decomposition obtained from the strongly regular graphs is derived.
We introduce a method of decomposing the family of intervals along a cyclic permutation into chains to determine the size of the largest family of subsets of $[n]:= \{1,2,...,n\}$ not containing one or more given posets as a subposet. De Bonis, Katona and Swanepoel determined the size of the largest butterfly-free family. We strengthen this result by showing that, for certain posets containing the butterfly poset as a subposet, the same bound holds. We also obtain the corresponding LYM-type inequalities.
The Boolean lattice $2^{[n]}$ is the family of all subsets of $[n]=\{1,\dots,n\}$ ordered by inclusion, and a chain is a family of pairwise comparable elements of $2^{[n]}$. Let $s=2^{n}/\binom{n}{\lfloor n/2\rfloor}$, which is the average size of a chain in a minimal chain decomposition of $2^{[n]}$. We prove that $2^{[n]}$ can be partitioned into $\binom{n}{\lfloor n/2\rfloor}$ chains such that all but at most $o(1)$ proportion of the chains have size $s(1+o(1))$. This asymptotically proves a conjecture of Füredi from 1985. Our proof is based on probabilistic arguments. To analyze our random…
The complete symmetric directed graph of order $v$, denoted $K_{v}^*$, is the directed graph on $v$ vertices that contains both arcs $(x,y)$ and $(y,x)$ for each pair of distinct vertices $x$ and $y$. For a given directed graph, $D$, the set of all $v$ for which $K_{v}^*$ admits a $D$-decomposition is called the spectrum of $D$. There are 10 non-isomorphic orientations of a $7$-cycle (heptagon). In this paper, we completely settled the spectrum problem for each of the oriented heptagons.
The de Bruijn-Tengbergen-Kruyswijk (BTK) construction is a simple algorithm that produces an explicit symmetric chain decomposition of a product of chains. We linearize the BTK algorithm and show that it produces an explicit symmetric Jordan basis (SJB). In the special case of a Boolean algebra the resulting SJB is orthogonal with respect to the standard inner product and, moreover, we can write down an explicit formula for the ratio of the lengths of the successive vectors in these chains (i.e., the singular values). This yields a new, constructive proof of the explicit block diagonalization …
We prove that the noncrossing partition lattices associated with the complex reflection groups $G(d,d,n)$ for $d,n\geq 2$ admit symmetric decompositions into Boolean subposets. As a result, these lattices have the strong Sperner property and their rank-generating polynomials are symmetric, unimodal, and $γ$-nonnegative. We use computer computations to complete the proof that every noncrossing partition lattice associated with a well-generated complex reflection group is strongly Sperner, thus answering affirmatively a question raised by D. Armstrong.
The $n$-cube is the poset obtained by ordering all subsets of $\{1,\ldots,n\}$ by inclusion, and it can be partitioned into $\binom{n}{\lfloor n/2\rfloor}$ chains, which is the minimum possible number. Two such decompositions of the $n$-cube are called orthogonal if any two chains of the decompositions share at most a single element. Shearer and Kleitman conjectured in 1979 that the $n$-cube has $\lfloor n/2\rfloor+1$ pairwise orthogonal decompositions into the minimum number of chains, and they constructed two such decompositions. Spink recently improved this by showing that the $n$-cube has …
The $q,t$-Catalan number $\mathrm{Cat}_n(q,t)$ enumerates integer partitions contained in an $n\times n$ triangle by their dinv and external area statistics. The paper [LLL18 (Lee, Li, Loehr, SIAM J. Discrete Math. 32(2018))] proposed a new approach to understanding the symmetry property $\mathrm{Cat}_n(q,t)=\mathrm{Cat}_n(t,q)$ based on decomposing the set of all integer partitions into infinite chains. Each such global chain $\mathcal{C}_μ$ has an opposite chain $\mathcal{C}_{μ^*}$; these combine to give a new small slice of $\mathrm{Cat}_n(q,t)$ that is symmetric in $q$ and $t$. Here we adv…
The Boolean lattice $2^{[n]}$ is the power set of $[n]$ ordered by inclusion. A chain $c_{0}\subset...\subset c_{k}$ in $2^{[n]}$ is rank-symmetric, if $|c_{i}|+|c_{k-i}|=n$ for $i=0,...,k$; and it is symmetric, if $|c_{i}|=(n-k)/2+i$. We show that there exist a bijection $$p: [n]^{(\geq n/2)}\rightarrow [n]^{(\leq n/2)}$$ and a partial ordering $<$ on $[n]^{(\geq n/2)}$ satisfying the following properties: (i) $\subset$ is an extension of $<$ on $[n]^{(\geq n/2)}$; (ii) if $C\subset [n]^{(\geq n/2)}$ is a chain with respect to $<$, then $p(C)\cup C$ is a rank-symmetric chain in $2^{[n]}$, whe…
In algebraic, topological, and geometric combinatorics inequalities among the coefficients of combinatorial polynomials are frequently studied. Recently a notion called the alternatingly increasing property, which is stronger than unimodality, was introduced. In this paper, we relate the alternatingly increasing property to real-rootedness of the symmetric decomposition of a polynomial to develop a systematic approach for proving the alternatingly increasing property for several classes of polynomials. We apply our results to strengthen and generalize real-rootedness, unimodality, and alternat…
A finite ranked poset is called a symmetric chain order if it can be written as a disjoint union of rank-symmetric, saturated chains. If $P$ is any symmetric chain order, we prove that $P^n/\mathbb{Z}_n$ is also a symmetric chain order, where $\mathbb{Z}_n$ acts on $P^n$ by cyclic permutation of the factors.
In this paper we deal with edge-to-edge, irreducible decompositions of a centrally symmetric convex $(2k)$-gon into centrally symmetric convex pieces. We prove an upper bound on the number of these decompositions for any value of $k$, and characterize them for octagons.
We bound the tensor ranks of elementary symmetric polynomials, and we give explicit decompositions into powers of linear forms. The bound is attained when the degree is odd.
The derangement polynomial $d_n (x)$ for the symmetric group enumerates derangements by the number of excedances. The derangement polynomial $d^B_n(x)$ for the hyperoctahedral group is a natural type $B$ analogue. A new combinatorial formula for this polynomial is given in this paper. This formula implies that $d^B_n (x)$ decomposes as a sum of two nonnegative, symmetric and unimodal polynomials whose centers of symmetry differ by a half and thus provides a new transparent proof of its unimodality. A geometric interpretation, analogous to Stanley's interpretation of $d_n (x)$ as the local $h$-…
R. Canfield has conjectured that for all subgroups G of the automorphism group of the Boolean lattice B(n) (which can be regarded as the symmetric group S(n)) the quotient order B(n)/G is a symmetric chain order. We provide a straightforward proof of a generalization of a result of K. K. Jordan: namely, B(n)/G is an SCO whenever G is generated by powers of disjoint cycles. The symmetric chain decompositions of Greene and Kleitman provide the basis for partitions of these quotients.
This article is part of an ongoing investigation of the combinatorics of $q,t$-Catalan numbers $\textrm{Cat}_n(q,t)$. We develop a structure theory for integer partitions based on the partition statistics dinv, deficit, and minimum triangle height. Our goal is to decompose the infinite set of partitions of deficit $k$ into a disjoint union of chains $\mathcal{C}_μ$ indexed by partitions of size $k$. Among other structural properties, these chains can be paired to give refinements of the famous symmetry property $\textrm{Cat}_n(q,t)=\textrm{Cat}_n(t,q)$. Previously, we introduced a map that bui…
There is a well-known bijection between parking functions of a fixed length and maximal chains of the noncrossing partition lattice which we can use to associate to each set of parking functions a poset whose Hasse diagram is the union of the corresponding maximal chains. We introduce a decomposition of parking functions based on the largest number omitted and prove several theorems about the corresponding posets. In particular, they share properties with the noncrossing partition lattice such as local self-duality, a nice characterization of intervals, a readily computable Möbius function, an…
Consider a uniformly chosen random reduced decomposition of the longest element in the symmetric group. It is known that the location of the first transposition in this decomposition converges to the semicircle distribution. In this note we provide a sharp error term for this result, using the "comparison of generators" approach to Stein's method.
The quotient of a Boolean algebra by a cyclic group is proven to have a symmetric chain decomposition. This generalizes earlier work of Griggs, Killian and Savage on the case of prime order, giving an explicit construction for any order, prime or composite. The combinatorial map specifying how to proceed downward in a symmetric chain is shown to be a natural cyclic analogue of the $\mathfrak{sl}_2$ lowering operator in the theory of crystal bases.
In this paper, we give a combinatorial rule to calculate the decomposition of the tensor product (Kronecker product) of two irreducible complex representations of the symmetric group ${\mathfrak S}_n$, when one of the representations corresponds to a hook $(n-m, 1^m)$.
We study rational generating functions of sequences $\{a_n\}_{n\geq 0}$ that agree with a polynomial and investigate symmetric decompositions of the numerator polynomial for subsequences $\{a_{rn}\}_{n\geq 0}$. We prove that if the numerator polynomial for $\{a_n\}_{n\geq 0}$ is of degree $s$ and its coefficients satisfy a set of natural linear inequalities then the symmetric decomposition of the numerator for $\{a_{rn}\}_{n\geq 0}$ is real-rooted whenever $r\geq \max \{s,d+1-s\}$. Moreover, if the numerator polynomial for $\{a_n\}_{n\geq 0}$ is symmetric then we show that the symmetric decomp…
We study a multivariate Markov chain on the symmetric group with remarkable enumerative properties. We conjecture that the stationary distribution of this Markov chain can be expressed in terms of positive sums of Schubert polynomials. This Markov chain is a multivariate generalization of a Markov chain introduced by the first author in the study of random affine Weyl group elements.
This paper is an attempt to compute the decomposition numbers of the blocks of the symmetric group which have "small defect"; that is, blocks of weight smaller than the characteristic. We present various methods for computing such decomposition numbers and use these as support for a conjecture which relates decomposition numbers in different characteristics. Finally, we apply our techniques to blocks of weight three.
Assur graphs are a tool originally developed by mechanical engineers to decompose mechanisms for simpler analysis and synthesis. Recent work has connected these graphs to strongly directed graphs, and decompositions of the pinned rigidity matrix. Many mechanisms have initial configurations which are symmetric, and other recent work has exploited the orbit matrix as a symmetry adapted form of the rigidity matrix. This paper explores how the decomposition and analysis of symmetric frameworks and their symmetric motions can be supported by the new symmetry adapted tools.
A joint degree matrix (JDM) specifies the number of connections between nodes of given degrees in a graph, for all degree pairs and uniquely determines the degree sequence of the graph. We consider the space of all balanced realizations of an arbitrary JDM, realizations in which the links between any two degree groups are placed as uniformly as possible. We prove that a swap Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm in the space of all balanced realizations of an {\em arbitrary} graphical JDM mixes rapidly, i.e., the relaxation time of the chain is bounded from above by a polynomial in the num…
Littlewood-Richardson rule gives the decomposition formula for the multiplication of two Schur functions, while the decomposition formula for the multiplication of two Hall-Littlewood functions or two universal characters is also given by the combinatorial method. In this paper, using the vertex operator realizations of these symmetric functions, we construct the algebraic forms of these decomposition formulas.
We consider symmetric (under the action of products of finite symmetric groups) real algebraic varieties and semi-algebraic sets, as well as symmetric complex varieties in affine and projective spaces, defined by polynomials of degrees bounded by a fixed constant $d$. We prove that if a Specht module, $\mathbb{S}^λ$, appears with positive multiplicity in the isotypic decomposition of the cohomology modules of such sets, then the rank of the partition $λ$ is bounded by $O(d)$. This implies a polynomial (in the dimension of the ambient space) bound on the number of such modules. Furthermore, we …