English

A bijective enumeration of labeled trees with given indegree sequence

Combinatorics 2022-03-22 v5 Algebraic Geometry

Abstract

For a labeled tree on the vertex set {1,2,,n}\set{1,2,\ldots,n}, the local direction of each edge (ij)(i\,j) is from ii to jj if i<ji<j. For a rooted tree, there is also a natural global direction of edges towards the root. The number of edges pointing to a vertex is called its indegree. Thus the local (resp. global) indegree sequence λ=1e12e2\lambda = 1^{e_1}2^{e_2} \ldots of a tree on the vertex set {1,2,,n}\set{1,2,\ldots,n} is a partition of n1n-1. We construct a bijection from (unrooted) trees to rooted trees such that the local indegree sequence of a (unrooted) tree equals the global indegree sequence of the corresponding rooted tree. Combining with a Pr\"ufer-like code for rooted labeled trees, we obtain a bijective proof of a recent conjecture by Cotterill and also solve two open problems proposed by Du and Yin. We also prove a qq-multisum binomial coefficient identity which confirms another conjecture of Cotterill in a very special case.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0805.0067,
  title  = {A bijective enumeration of labeled trees with given indegree sequence},
  author = {Heesung Shin and Jiang Zeng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0805.0067},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

16 pages, 6 figures; Changed title and content

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:36:28.434Z