Related papers: How many pop-stacks does it take to sort a permuta…

Partially ordered patterns (POPs) play an important role in the study of permutation patterns, providing a convenient framework for describing large families of classical patterns. The problem of enumerating permutations that avoid POPs has…

Various forms of sorting problems have been studied over the years. Recently, two kinds of sorting puzzle apps are popularized. In these puzzles, we are given a set of bins filled with colored units, balls or water, and some empty bins.…

A permutation $\pi$ contains a pattern $\sigma$ if and only if there is a subsequence in $\pi$ with its letters are in the same relative order as those in $\sigma$. Partially ordered patterns (POPs) provide a convenient way to denote…

In 1966, Claude Berge proposed the following sorting problem. Given a string of $n$ alternating white and black pegs on a one-dimensional board consisting of an unlimited number of empty holes, rearrange the pegs into a string consisting of…

In 1937, biologists Sturtevant and Tan posed a computational question: transform a chromosome represented by a permutation of genes, into a second permutation, using a minimum-length sequence of reversals, each inverting the order of a…

For each positive integer $n$, we denote by $\omega^*(n)$ the number of shifted-prime divisors $p-1$ of $n$, i.e., \[\omega^*(n):=\sum_{p-1\mid n}1.\] First introduced by Prachar in 1955, this function has interesting applications in…

We study a family of sorting match puzzles on grids, which we call permutation match puzzles. In this puzzle, each row and column of a $n \times n$ grid is labeled with an ordering constraint -- ascending (A) or descending (D) -- and the…

A sock ordering is a sequence of socks with different colors. A sock ordering is foot-sortable if the sequence of socks can be sorted by a stack so that socks with the same color form a contiguous block. The problem of deciding whether a…

We give three applications of a recently-proven "Decomposition Lemma," which allows one to count preimages of certain sets of permutations under West's stack-sorting map $s$. We first enumerate the permutation class…

We introduce parking assortments, a generalization of parking functions with cars of assorted lengths. In this setting, there are $n\in\mathbb{N}$ cars of lengths $\mathbf{y}=(y_1,y_2,\ldots,y_n)\in\mathbb{N}^n$ entering a one-way street…

We initiate the study of subpolytopes of the permutahedron that arise as the convex hulls of stack-sorting on permutations. We primarily focus on $Ln1$ permutations, i.e., permutations of length $n$ whose penultimate and last entries are…

Permutation is the different arrangements that can be made with a given number of things taking some or all of them at a time. The notation P(n,r) is used to denote the number of permutations of n things taken r at a time. Permutation is…

Given positive integers $n$ and $m$, let $p_n(m)$ be the probability that a uniform random permutation of $[n]$ has order exactly $m$. We show that, as $n \to \infty$, the maximum of $p_n(m)$ over all $m$ is asymptotic to $1/n$, the…

We consider two orthogonal points of view on finite permutations, seen as pairs of linear orders (corresponding to the usual one line representation of permutations as words) or seen as bijections (corresponding to the algebraic point of…

A permutation is called {\it {block-wise simple}} if it contains no interval of the form $p_1\oplus p_2$ or $p_1 \ominus p_2$. We present this new set of permutations and explore some of its combinatorial properties. We present a generating…

In 1876, Edouard Lucas showed that if an integer $b$ exists such that $b^{n-1} \equiv 1 (\mathrm{mod} \ n)$ and $b^{(n-1)/p} \not\equiv 1( \mathrm{mod} \ n)$ for all prime divisors $p$ of $n-1$ , then $n$ is prime, a result known as Lucas's…

The subject of pattern avoiding permutations has its roots in computer science, namely in the problem of sorting a permutation through a stack. A formula for the number of permutations of length n that can be sorted by passing it twice…

The order $O_n(\sigma)$ of a permutation $\sigma$ of $n$ objects is the smallest integer $k \geq 1$ such that the $k$-th iterate of $\sigma$ gives the identity. A remarkable result about the order of a uniformly chosen permutation is due to…

Inspired by a common technique for shuffling a deck of cards on a table without riffling, we formalize the pile shuffle and investigate its capabilities as a sorting device. Our study is novel in that we consider pile shuffle in three…

A partially ordered pattern (abbreviated POP) is a partially ordered set (poset) that generalizes the notion of a pattern when we are not concerned with the relative order of some of its letters. The notion of partially ordered patterns…