English

Generating functions for Wilf equivalence under generalized factor order

Combinatorics 2010-05-25 v1

Abstract

Kitaev, Liese, Remmel, and Sagan recently defined generalized factor order on words comprised of letters from a partially ordered set (P,P)(P, \leq_P) by setting uPwu \leq_P w if there is a subword vv of ww of the same length as uu such that the ii-th character of vv is greater than or equal to the ii-th character of uu for all ii. This subword vv is called an embedding of uu into ww. For the case where PP is the positive integers with the usual ordering, they defined the weight of a word w=w1wnw = w_1\ldots w_n to be wt(w)=xi=1nwitn\text{wt}(w) = x^{\sum_{i=1}^n w_i} t^{n}, and the corresponding weight generating function F(u;t,x)=wPuwt(w)F(u;t,x) = \sum_{w \geq_P u} \text{wt}(w). They then defined two words uu and vv to be Wilf equivalent, denoted uvu \backsim v, if and only if F(u;t,x)=F(v;t,x)F(u;t,x) = F(v;t,x). They also defined the related generating function S(u;t,x)=wS(u)wt(w)S(u;t,x) = \sum_{w \in \mathcal{S}(u)} \text{wt}(w) where S(u)\mathcal{S}(u) is the set of all words ww such that the only embedding of uu into ww is a suffix of ww, and showed that uvu \backsim v if and only if S(u;t,x)=S(v;t,x)S(u;t,x) = S(v;t,x). We continue this study by giving an explicit formula for S(u;t,x)S(u;t,x) if uu factors into a weakly increasing word followed by a weakly decreasing word. We use this formula as an aid to classify Wilf equivalence for all words of length 3. We also show that coefficients of related generating functions are well-known sequences in several special cases. Finally, we discuss a conjecture that if uvu \backsim v then uu and vv must be rearrangements, and the stronger conjecture that there also must be a weight-preserving bijection f:S(u)S(v)f: \mathcal{S}(u) \rightarrow \mathcal{S}(v) such that f(u)f(u) is a rearrangement of uu for all uu.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1005.4372,
  title  = {Generating functions for Wilf equivalence under generalized factor order},
  author = {Thomas Langley and Jeffrey Liese and Jeffrey Remmel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1005.4372},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

23 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-21T15:27:04.558Z