Enumerating Permutations by their Run Structure

  • Christopher J. Fewster
  • Daniel Siemssen
Keywords: Enumerative combinatorics, permutations

Abstract

Motivated by a problem in quantum field theory, we study the up and down structure of circular and linear permutations. In particular, we count the length of the (alternating) runs of permutations by representing them as monomials and find that they can always be decomposed into so-called 'atomic' permutations introduced in this work. This decomposition allows us to enumerate the (circular) permutations of a subset of $\mathbb{N}$ by the length of their runs. Furthermore, we rederive, in an elementary way and using the methods developed here, a result due to Kitaev on the enumeration of valleys.

Published
2014-10-23
Article Number
P4.18