English

The Absolute Orders on the Coxeter Groups $A_n$ and $B_n$ are Sperner

Combinatorics 2019-02-25 v1

Abstract

Over 50 years ago, Rota posted the following celebrated `Research Problem': prove or disprove that the partial order of partitions on an nn-set (i.e., the refinement order) is Sperner. A counterexample was eventually discovered by Canfield in 1978. However, Harper and Kim recently proved that a closely related order --- i.e., the refinement order on the symmetric group --- is not only Sperner, but strong Sperner. Equivalently, the well-known absolute order on the symmetric group is strong Sperner. In this paper, we extend these results by giving a concise, elegant proof that the absolute orders on the Coxeter groups AnA_n and BnB_n are strong Sperner.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1902.08334,
  title  = {The Absolute Orders on the Coxeter Groups $A_n$ and $B_n$ are Sperner},
  author = {Lawrence H. Harper and Gene B. Kim and Neal Livesay},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.08334},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

6 pages, 2 tikz figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T07:47:49.747Z