Related papers: On Bergeron's positivity problem for $q$-binomial …

We conjecture that, if the quotient of two $q$-binomial coefficients with the same top argument is a polynomial, then it has non-negative coefficients. We summarise what is known about the conjecture and prove it in two non-trivial cases.…

The $q$-binomial coefficients $\qbinom{n}{m}=\prod_{i=1}^m(1-q^{n-m+i})/(1-q^i)$, for integers $0\le m\le n$, are known to be polynomials with non-negative integer coefficients. This readily follows from the $q$-binomial theorem, or the…

An interesting, and still wide open, conjecture of Reiner and Stanton predicts that certain "strange" symmetric differences of $q$-binomial coefficients are always nonnegative and unimodal. We extend their conjecture to a broader, and…

A recent nice result due to I. Pak and G. Panova is the strict unimodality of the $q$-binomial coefficients $\binom{a+b}{b}_q$ (see \cite{PP} and also \cite{PP2} for a slightly revised version of their theorem). Since their proof used…

Several new transformations for q-binomial coefficients are found, which have the special feature that the kernel is a polynomial with nonnegative coefficients. By studying the group-like properties of these positivity preserving…

Bergeron--Ceballos--K\"ustner introduced the $q$-Fibonomial coefficients \( \qfibonom{m+n}{n}\), gave a combinatorial interpretation of the $q$-Fibonomial coefficients via a weighted path-domino tiling model, and conjectured that these…

We first prove that if $a$ has a prime factor not dividing $b$ then there are infinitely many positive integers $n$ such that $\binom {an+bn} {an}$ is not divisible by $bn+1$. This confirms a recent conjecture of Z.-W. Sun. Moreover, we…

In Pacific J. Math. 292 (2018), 223-238, Shareshian and Woodroofe asked if for every positive integer $n$ there exist primes $p$ and $q$ such that, for all integers $k$ with $1 \leq k \leq n-1$, the binomial coefficient $\binom{n}{k}$ is…

We prove that, if $m,n\geqslant 1$ and $a_1,\ldots,a_m$ are nonnegative integers, then \begin{align*} \frac{[a_1+\cdots+a_m+1]!}{[a_1]!\ldots[a_m]!}\sum^{n-1}_{h=0}q^h\prod_{i=1}^m{h\brack a_i} \equiv 0\pmod{[n]}, \end{align*} where…

The polynomial coefficient $\binom {n,q}{k}$ is defined to be the coefficient of $x^{k}$ in the expansion of $(1+x+x^2+... +x^{q-1})^n$. In this note we give an asymptotic estimate for $\binom {n,q}{cn}$ as $n$ tends to infinity, where $c$…

Suppose that $p$ is an odd prime and $m$ is an integer not divisible by $p$. Sun and Tauraso [Adv. in Appl. Math., 45(2010), 125--148] gave $\sum_{k=0}^{n-1}\binom{2k}{k+d}/m^k$ and $\sum_{k=0}^{n-1}\binom{2k}{k+d}/(km^k)$ modulo $p$ for…

Wang and Yeh proved that if $P(x)$ is a polynomial with nonnegative and nondecreasing coefficients, then $P(x+d)$ is unimodal for any $d>0$. A mode of a unimodal polynomial $f(x)=a_0+a_1x+\cdots + a_mx^m$ is an index $k$ such that $a_k$ is…

Pak and Panova recently proved that the $q$-binomial coefficient ${m+n \choose m}_q$ is a strictly unimodal polynomial in $q$ for $m,n \geq 8$, via the representation theory of the symmetric group. We give a direct combinatorial proof of…

We show that, for all positive integers $n_1, \ldots, n_m$, $n_{m+1}=n_1$, and any non-negative integers $j$ and $r$ with $j\leqslant m$, the expression $$ \frac{1}{[n_1]}{n_1+n_{m}\brack n_1}^{-1}…

Let $P(x)$ be a polynomial of degree $m$, with nonnegative and non-decreasing coefficients. We settle the conjecture that for any positive real number $d$, the coefficients of $P(x+d)$ form a unimodal sequence, of which the special case $d$…

It is shown that the polynomial \[p(t) = \text{Tr}[(A+tB)^m]\] has positive coefficients when $m = 6$ and $A$ and $B$ are any two 3-by-3 complex Hermitian positive definite matrices. This case is the first that is not covered by prior,…

We look at the asymptotic behavior of the coefficients of the $q$-binomial coefficients (or Gaussian polynomials) $\binom{a+k}{k}_q$, when $k$ is fixed. We give a number of results in this direction, some of which involve Eulerian…

Consider \begin{align*} G(N,M;\alpha,\beta,K,q) = \sum\limits_{j\in\mathbb{Z}}(-1)^jq^{\frac{1}{2}Kj((\alpha+\beta)j+\alpha-\beta)}\left[\begin{matrix}M+N\\N-Kj\end{matrix}\right]_{q}. \end{align*} In this paper, we prove the non-negativity…

Using a property of the q-shifted factorial, an identity for q-binomial coefficients is proved, which is used to derive the formulas for the q-binomial coefficient for negative arguments. The result is in agreement with an earlier paper…

We consider the set $\Pi ^*_d$ of monic polynomials $Q_d=x^d+\sum _{j=0}^{d-1}a_jx^j$, $x\in \mathbb{R}$, $a_j\in \mathbb{R}^*$, having $d$ distinct real roots, and its subsets defined by fixing the signs of the coefficients $a_j$. We show…