English

A solution to one of Knuth's permutation problems

Combinatorics 2010-04-26 v1

Abstract

We answer a problem posed recently by Knuth: an n-dimensional box, with edges lying on the positive coordinate axes and generic edge lengths W_1 < W_2 < ... < W_n, is dissected into n! pieces along the planes x_i = x_j. We describe which pieces have the same volume, and show that there are C_n distinct volumes, where C_n denotes the nth Catalan number.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1004.4159,
  title  = {A solution to one of Knuth's permutation problems},
  author = {Benjamin Young},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1004.4159},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

4 pages, 2 figures.

R2 v1 2026-06-21T15:14:03.585Z