English

Flexagons yield a curious Catalan number identity

Combinatorics 2010-06-04 v2

Abstract

Hexaflexagons were popularized by the late Martin Gardner in his first Scientific American column in 1956. Oakley and Wisner showed that they can be represented abstractly by certain recursively defined permutations called pats, and deduced that they are counted by the Catalan numbers. Counting pats by number of descents yields the curious identity Sum[1/(2n-2k+1)binom{2n-2k+1}{k}binom{2k}{n-k},k=0..n] = C(n), where only the middle third of the summands are nonzero.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1005.5736,
  title  = {Flexagons yield a curious Catalan number identity},
  author = {David Callan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1005.5736},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

4 pages, shorter method, suggested by Ira Gessel; other (minor) improvements

R2 v1 2026-06-21T15:30:10.066Z