English

Bounding Klarner's constant from above using a simple recurrence

Combinatorics 2025-07-15 v1

Abstract

Klarner and Rivest showed that the growth of the number of polyominoes, also known as Klarner's constant, is at most 2+22<4.832+2\sqrt{2}<4.83 by viewing polyominoes as a sequence of twigs with appropriate weights given to each twig and studying the corresponding multivariate generating function. In this short note, we give a simpler proof by a recurrence on an upper bound. In particular, we show that the number of polyominoes with nn cells is at most G(n)G(n) with G(0)=G(1)=1G(0)=G(1)=1 and for n2n\ge 2, G(n)=2m=1n1G(m)G(n1m). G(n) = 2\sum_{m=1}^{n-1} G(m)G(n-1-m). It should be noted that G(n)G(n) has multiple combinatorial interpretations in literature.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.20143,
  title  = {Bounding Klarner's constant from above using a simple recurrence},
  author = {Vuong Bui},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.20143},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

6 pages, 3 figures; comments are welcome

R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:50:38.327Z