English

The Rank and Minimal Border Strip Decompositions of a Skew Partition

Combinatorics 2007-05-23 v1 Representation Theory

Abstract

Nazarov and Tarasov recently generalized the notion of the rank of a partition to skew partitions. We give several characterizations of the rank of a skew partition and one possible characterization that remains open. One of the characterizations involves the decomposition of a skew shape into a minimal number of border strips, and we develop a theory of these MBSD's as well as of the closely related minimal border strip tableaux. An application is given to the value of a character of the symmetric group S_n indexed by a skew shape z at a permutation whose number of cycles is the rank of z.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.math/0109092,
  title  = {The Rank and Minimal Border Strip Decompositions of a Skew Partition},
  author = {Richard P. Stanley},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:math/0109092},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

31 pages, 10 figures