English

Pairs of eventually constant maps and nilpotent pairs

Representation Theory 2025-12-04 v1 Combinatorics Rings and Algebras

Abstract

Tom Leinster gave a bijective correspondence between the set of operators on a finite-dimensional vector space VV and the set of pairs consisting of a nilpotent operator and a vector in VV. Over a finite field this bijection implies that the probability that an operator be nilpotent is the reciprocal of the number of vectors in VV. We generalize this correspondence to pairs of operators between pairs of vector spaces and determine the probability that a random pair of operators be nilpotent. We also determine the set-theoretical counterpart of this construction and compute the number of eventually constant pairs of maps between two finite sets, closely related to the number of spanning trees in a complete bipartite graph.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.03367,
  title  = {Pairs of eventually constant maps and nilpotent pairs},
  author = {Weixi Chen and Mee Seong Im and Mikhail Khovanov and Catherine Lillja and Nicolas Rugo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.03367},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

15 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:06:55.827Z