English

Fertility Numbers

Combinatorics 2019-10-23 v3

Abstract

A nonnegative integer is called a fertility number if it is equal to the number of preimages of a permutation under West's stack-sorting map. We prove structural results concerning permutations, allowing us to deduce information about the set of fertility numbers. In particular, the set of fertility numbers is closed under multiplication and contains every nonnegative integer that is not congruent to 33 modulo 44. We show that the lower asymptotic density of the set of fertility numbers is at least 1954/25650.76181954/2565\approx 0.7618. We also exhibit some positive integers that are not fertility numbers and conjecture that there are infinitely many such numbers.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1809.04421,
  title  = {Fertility Numbers},
  author = {Colin Defant},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.04421},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

16 pages, 10 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1809.03123

R2 v1 2026-06-23T04:03:50.915Z