English

Intervals of permutations and the principal M\"{o}bius function

Combinatorics 2018-10-24 v2

Abstract

We show that the proportion of permutations of length nn with principal M\"{o}bius function equal to zero, Z(n)Z(n), is asymptotically bounded below by 0.3995. If a permutation π\pi contains two intervals of length 2, where one interval is an ascent and the other a descent, then we show that the value of the principal M\"{o}bius function μ[1,π]\mu [1, \pi] is zero, and we use this result to find the lower bound for Z(n)Z(n). We also show that if a permutation ϕ\phi has certain properties, then any permutation π\pi which contains an interval order-isomorphic to ϕ\phi has μ[1,π]=0\mu[1, \pi] = 0.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1806.10362,
  title  = {Intervals of permutations and the principal M\"{o}bius function},
  author = {Robert Brignall and David Marchant},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1806.10362},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

18 pages, 5 figures, 4 tables. An expanded version of this paper, with two additional authors, is available at arXiv:1810.05449

R2 v1 2026-06-23T02:43:15.627Z