English

Degree asymptotics of the numerical semigroup tree

Combinatorics 2024-03-21 v1

Abstract

A \emph{numerical semigroup} is a subset Λ\Lambda of the nonnegative integers that is closed under addition, contains 00, and omits only finitely many nonnegative integers (called the \emph{gaps} of Λ\Lambda). The collection of all numerical semigroups may be visually represented by a tree of element removals, in which the children of a semigroup Λ\Lambda are formed by removing one element of Λ\Lambda that exceeds all existing gaps of Λ\Lambda. In general, a semigroup may have many children or none at all, making it difficult to understand the number of semigroups at a given depth on the tree. We investigate the problem of estimating the number of semigroups at depth gg (i.e.\ of genus gg) with hh children, showing that as gg becomes large, it tends to a proportion ϕh2\phi^{-h-2} of all numerical semigroups, where ϕ\phi is the golden ratio.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2403.13120,
  title  = {Degree asymptotics of the numerical semigroup tree},
  author = {Evan O'Dorney},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.13120},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

12 pages, 1 figure. Corrects several typos in the 2013 published version