Pattern Avoiding Permutations with a Unique Longest Increasing Subsequence

Abstract

We investigate permutations and involutions that avoid a pattern of length three and have a unique longest increasing subsequence (ULIS). We prove an explicit formula for 231-avoiders, we show that the growth rate for 321-avoiding permutations with a ULIS is 4, and prove that their generating function is not rational. We relate the case of 132-avoiders to the existing literature, raising some interesting questions. For involutions, we construct a bijection between 132-avoiding involutions with a ULIS and bidirectional ballot sequences.