Permutations Without Long Decreasing Subsequences and Random Matrices

Abstract

We study the shape of the Young diagram $\lambda$ associated via the Robinson–Schensted–Knuth algorithm to a random permutation in $S_n$ such that the length of the longest decreasing subsequence is not bigger than a fixed number $d$; in other words we study the restriction of the Plancherel measure to Young diagrams with at most $d$ rows. We prove that in the limit $n\to\infty$ the rows of $\lambda$ behave like the eigenvalues of a certain random matrix (namely the traceless Gaussian Unitary Ensemble random matrix) with $d$ rows and columns. In particular, the length of the longest increasing subsequence of such a random permutation behaves asymptotically like the largest eigenvalue of the corresponding random matrix.