Related papers: The extremals of the Kahn-Saks inequality

We survey some of the mechanisms used to prove that naturally defined sequences in combinatorics are log-concave. Among these mechanisms are Alexandrov's inequality for mixed discriminants, the Alexandrov Fenchel inequality for mixed…

The Kahn--Saks inequality is a classical result on the number of linear extensions of finite posets. We give a new proof of this inequality for posets of width two using explicit injections of lattice paths. As a consequence we obtain a…

Stanley's inequalities for partially ordered sets establish important log-concavity relations for sequences of linear extensions counts. Their extremals however, i.e., the equality cases of these inequalities, were until now poorly…

An old conjecture of Kahn and Saks says, roughly, that any poset $P$ of large enough width contains elements $x,y$ which are "balanced" in the sense that the probability that $x$ precedes $y$ in a uniformly random linear extension of $P$ is…

We investigate geometric and functional inequalities for the class of log-concave probability sequences. We prove dilation inequalities for log-concave probability measures on the integers. A functional analogue of this geometric inequality…

It has been conjectured by W. Chen that the distribution of the length of the longest increasing subsequence in a uniformly random permutation is log-concave. We propose a stronger version of this conjecture which involves the Kronecker…

The Alexandrov-Fenchel inequality, a far-reaching generalization of the classical isoperimetric inequality to arbitrary mixed volumes, lies at the heart of convex geometry. The characterization of its extremal bodies is a long-standing open…

Menon's proof of the preservation of log-concavity of sequences under convolution becomes simpler when adapted to 2-sided infinite sequences. Under assumption of log-concavity of two 2-sided infinite sequences, the existence of the…

Using calculus we show how to prove some combinatorial inequalities of the type log-concavity or log-convexity. It is shown by this method that binomial coefficients and Stirling numbers of the first and second kinds are log-concave, and…

We study the numerical characterization of two dimensional hard Lefschetz classes given by the complete intersections of nef classes. In Shenfeld and van Handel's breakthrough work on the characterization of the extremals of the…

In this paper, we use the analytic method of Odlyzko and Richmond to study the log-concavity of power series. If $f(z) = \sum_n a_nz^n$ is an infinite series with $a_n \geq 1$ and $a_0 + \cdots + a_n = O(n + 1)$ for all $n$, we prove that a…

We show that the large Cartesian powers of any graph have log-concave valencies with respect to a ffxed vertex. We show that the series of valencies of distance regular graphs is log-concave, thus improving on a result of (Taylor,…

Let $e_{n}^k$ be the entries in the classical Euler's difference table. We consider the array $d_{n}^{k}=e_n^k/k!$ for $0\leq k \leq n$, where $d_n^k$ can be interpreted as the number of k-fixed-points-permutations of [n]. We show that the…

We conjecture unimodality for some sequences of generalized Kronecker coefficients and prove it for partitions with at most two columns. The proof is based on a hard Lefschetz property for corresponding highest weight spaces. We also study…

Given a sequence (a_k) = a_0, a_1, a_2,... of real numbers, define a new sequence L(a_k) = (b_k) where b_k = a_k^2 - a_{k-1} a_{k+1}. So (a_k) is log-concave if and only if (b_k) is a nonnegative sequence. Call (a_k) "infinitely…

Descent polynomials and peak polynomials, which enumerate permutations with given descent and peak sets respectively, have recently received considerable attention. We give several formulas for $q$-analogs of these polynomials which refine…

This article investigates sharp comparison of moments for various classes of random variables appearing in a geometric context. In the first part of our work we find the optimal constants in the Khintchine inequality for random vectors…

Chen proposed a conjecture on the log-concavity of the generating function for the symmetric group with respect to the length of longest increasing subsequences of permutations. Motivated by Chen's log-concavity conjecture, B\'{o}na,…

We prove a lemma, which we call the Order Ideal Lemma, that can be used to demonstrate a wide array of log-concavity and log-convexity results in a combinatorial manner using order ideals in distributive lattices. We use the Order Ideal…

The classical Eulerian Numbers $A_{n,k}$ are known to be log-concave. Let $P_{n,k}$ and $Q_{n,k}$ be the number of even and odd permutations with $k$ excedances. In this paper, we show that $P_{n,k}$ and $Q_{n,k}$ are log-concave. For this,…