English

On the Lucky and Displacement Statistics of Stirling Permutations

Combinatorics 2024-03-07 v1

Abstract

Stirling permutations are parking functions, and we investigate two parking function statistics in the context of these objects: lucky cars and displacement. Among our results, we consider two extreme cases: extremely lucky Stirling permutations (those with maximally many lucky cars) and extremely unlucky Stirling permutations (those with exactly one lucky car). We show that the number of extremely lucky Stirling permutations of order nn is the Catalan number CnC_n, and the number of extremely unlucky Stirling permutations is (n1)!(n-1)!. We also give some results for luck that lies between these two extremes. Further, we establish that the displacement of any Stirling permutation of order nn is n2n^2, and we prove several results about displacement composition vectors. We conclude with directions for further study.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2403.03280,
  title  = {On the Lucky and Displacement Statistics of Stirling Permutations},
  author = {Laura Colmenarejo and Aleyah Dawkins and Jennifer Elder and Pamela E. Harris and Kimberly J. Harry and Selvi Kara and Dorian Smith and Bridget Eileen Tenner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.03280},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

17 pages, 3 tables