English

Minimum number of monotone subsequences of length 4 in permutations

Combinatorics 2015-06-03 v1

Abstract

We show that for every sufficiently large nn, the number of monotone subsequences of length four in a permutation on nn points is at least (n/34)+((n+1)/34)+((n+2)/34)\binom{\lfloor n/3 \rfloor}{4} + \binom{\lfloor(n+1)/3\rfloor}{4} + \binom{\lfloor (n+2)/3\rfloor}{4}. Furthermore, we characterize all permutations on [n][n] that attain this lower bound. The proof uses the flag algebra framework together with some additional stability arguments. This problem is equivalent to some specific type of edge colorings of complete graphs with two colors, where the number of monochromatic K4K_4's is minimized. We show that all the extremal colorings must contain monochromatic K4K_4's only in one of the two colors. This translates back to permutations, where all the monotone subsequences of length four are all either increasing, or decreasing only.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1411.3024,
  title  = {Minimum number of monotone subsequences of length 4 in permutations},
  author = {József Balogh and Ping Hu and Bernard Lidický and Oleg Pikhurko and Balázs Udvari and Jan Volec},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1411.3024},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

24 pages, 7 figures, accepted to Combinatorics, Probability and Computing