English

Substring compatibility of permutation statistics

Combinatorics 2025-10-30 v1

Abstract

A permutation statistic is substring-compatible if its value on a permutation determines its value on every substring of that permutation. We construct the substring coalgebra of such a statistic, an analog of the shuffle algebra of a shuffle-compatible statistic introduced by Gessel and Zhuang. Furthermore, we show that for substring-compatible statistics that also satisfy a weak form of shuffle compatibility, the shuffle algebra and substring coalgebra can be combined to yield a Hopf algebra. Finally, we conjecture that the only nontrivial permutation statistics that are both shuffle-compatible and substring-compatible are the descent set, the peak set, and the valley set, and we describe our progress towards proving this conjecture.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.25524,
  title  = {Substring compatibility of permutation statistics},
  author = {Michael Tang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.25524},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

17 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:11:53.046Z