Related papers: Unshuffling a deck of cards
Mathematics has been used in the exploration and enumeration of juggling patterns. In the case when we catch and throw one ball at a time the number of possible juggling patterns is well-known. When we are allowed to catch and throw any…
Pancake Flipping is the problem of sorting a stack of pancakes of different sizes (that is, a permutation), when the only allowed operation is to insert a spatula anywhere in the stack and to flip the pancakes above it (that is, to perform…
We introduce an algorithm that conjectures the structure of a permutation class in the form of a disjoint cover of "rules"; similar to generalized grid classes. The cover is usually easily verified by a human and translated into an…
We study the generalization of the game Lights Out in which the standard square grid board is replaced by a graph. We examine the probability that, when a graph is chosen uniformly at random from the set of graphs with $n$ vertices and $e$…
We study a new reconfiguration problem inspired by classic mechanical puzzles: a colored token is placed on each vertex of a given graph; we are also given a set of distinguished cycles on the graph. We are tasked with rearranging the…
Polylogarithmic functions (polylogs) in $n$ variables can be viewed as elements of $(U\mathfrak{p}_{m})^*$, the dual of the universal enveloping algebra of the Lie algebra $\mathfrak{p}_{m}$ of infinitesimal spherical pure braids with…
The problem of biclustering consists of the simultaneous clustering of rows and columns of a matrix such that each of the submatrices induced by a pair of row and column clusters is as uniform as possible. In this paper we approximate the…
Every two seeds in a field of fractions $\mathcal{F}$ together with a symmetric group element gives rise to an automorphism of $\mathcal{F}$ called an exchange automorphism. For positive cluster algebras, we provide equivalent conditions…
The problem of counting tilings of a plane region using specified tiles can often be recast as the problem of counting (perfect) matchings of some subgraph of an Aztec diamond graph A_n, or more generally calculating the sum of the weights…
The problem of genealogy of permutations has been solved partially by Stefan (odd order) and Acosta-Hum\'anez \& Bernhardt (power of two). It is well known that Sharkovskii's theorem shows the relationship between the cardinal of the set of…
Let $S$ be a connected graph which contains an induced path of $n-1$ vertices, where $n$ is the order of $S.$ We consider a puzzle on $S$. A configuration of the puzzle is simply an $n$-dimensional column vector over $\{0, 1\}$ with…
Let $B_t(n)$ be the number of set partitions of a set of size~$t$ into at most $n$ parts and let $B'_t(n)$ be the number of set partitions of $\{1,\ldots, t\}$ into at most $n$ parts such that no part contains both $1$ and~$t$ or both $i$…
Segerman's 15+4 puzzle is a hinged version of the classic 15-puzzle, in which the tiles rotate as they slide around. In 1974, Wilson classified the groups of solutions to sliding block puzzles. We generalize Wilson's result to puzzles like…
An exchangeable random matrix is a random matrix with distribution invariant under any permutation of the entries. For such random matrices, we show, as the dimension tends to infinity, that the empirical spectral distribution tends to the…
We consider the chessboard pebbling problem analyzed by Chung, Graham, Morrison and Odlyzko [3]. We study the number of reachable configurations $G(k)$ and a related double sequence $G(k,m)$. Exact expressions for these are derived, and we…
We present the theorem which determines, by a permutation, the cardinal ordering of fixed points for any orbit of a period doubling cascade. The inverse permutation generates the orbit and the symbolic sequence of the orbit is obtained as a…
By algebraic group theory, there is a map from the semisimple conjugacy classes of a finite group of Lie type to the conjugacy classes of the Weyl group. Picking a semisimple class uniformly at random yields a probability measure on…
We consider the set of permutations that are sorted after two passes through a pop stack. We characterize these permutations in terms of forbidden patterns (classical and barred) and enumerate them according to the ascent statistic. Then we…
We extend a technique for lower-bounding the mixing time of card-shuffling Markov chains, and use it to bound the mixing time of the Rudvalis Markov chain, as well as two variants considered by Diaconis and Saloff-Coste. We show that in…
Matrices are two-dimensional data structures allowing one to conceptually organize information. For example, adjacency matrices are useful to store the links of a network; correlation matrices are simple ways to arrange gene co-expression…