English

On Two Families of Generalizations of Pascal's Triangle

Combinatorics 2022-12-21 v1

Abstract

We consider two families of Pascal-like triangles that have all ones on the left side and ones separated by m1m-1 zeros on the right side. The m=1m=1 cases are Pascal's triangle and the two families also coincide when m=2m=2. Members of the first family obey Pascal's recurrence everywhere inside the triangle. We show that the mm-th triangle can also be obtained by reversing the elements up to and including the main diagonal in each row of the (1/(1xm),x/(1x))(1/(1-x^m),x/(1-x)) Riordan array. Properties of this family of triangles can be obtained quickly as a result. The (n,k)(n,k)-th entry in the mm-th member of the second family of triangles is the number of tilings of an (n+k)×1(n+k)\times1 board that use kk (1,m1)(1,m-1)-fences and nkn-k unit squares. A (1,g)(1,g)-fence is composed of two unit square sub-tiles separated by a gap of width gg. We show that the entries in the antidiagonals of these triangles are coefficients of products of powers of two consecutive Fibonacci polynomials and give a bijective proof that these coefficients give the number of kk-subsets of {1,2,,nm}\{1,2,\ldots,n-m\} such that no two elements of a subset differ by mm. Other properties of the second family of triangles are also obtained via a combinatorial approach. Finally, we give necessary and sufficient conditions for any Pascal-like triangle (or its row-reversed version) derived from tiling (n×1)(n\times1)-boards to be a Riordan array.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2201.13253,
  title  = {On Two Families of Generalizations of Pascal's Triangle},
  author = {Michael A. Allen and Kenneth Edwards},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.13253},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

20 pages, 6 figures