Related papers: Circular sorting, strong complete mappings and wre…

We examine a computational geometric problem concerning the structure of polymers. We model a polymer as a polygonal chain in three dimensions. Each edge splits the polymer into two subchains, and a dihedral rotation rotates one of these…

We consider the cycle structure of a random permutation $\sigma$ chosen uniformly from the symmetric group, subject to the constraint that $\sigma$ does not contain cycles of length exceeding $r.$ We prove that under suitable conditions the…

A universal cycle for permutations of length $n$ is a cyclic word or permutation, any factor of which is order-isomorphic to exactly one permutation of length $n$, and containing all permutations of length $n$ as factors. It is well known…

We study a class of rearrangement problems under a novel pick-n-swap prehensile manipulation model, in which a robotic manipulator, capable of carrying an item and making item swaps, is tasked to sort items stored in lattices of variable…

The problem of determining which permutations can be sorted using certain switchyard networks dates back to Knuth in 1968. In this work, we are interested in permutations which are sortable on a double-ended queue (called a deque), or on…

Using a result of Gessel and Reutenauer, we find a simple formula for the number of cyclic permutations with a given descent set, by expressing it in terms of ordinary descent numbers (i.e., those counting all permutations with a given…

Given a graph where every vertex has exactly one labeled token, how can we most quickly execute a given permutation on the tokens? In (sequential) token swapping, the goal is to use the shortest possible sequence of swaps, each of which…

For a fixed prime $p$, we consider a filtration of the commuting complex of elements of order $p$ in the symmetric group $\mathfrak{S}_n$. The filtration is obtained by imposing successively relaxed bounds on the number of disjoint…

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…

Let $p\equiv 1 \pmod{4}$ be a prime. Write $t = \prod_{x=1}^{(p-1)/2}x$. Since $t ^2\equiv -1 \pmod{p}$ , we can divide $\{1,2,\ldots,(p-1)/2\}$ into $(p-1)/4$ ordered pairs so that each pair, say $<a,\tilde{a}>$ , satisfies that $t a…

We count the number of occurrences of restricted patterns of length 3 in permutations with respect to length and the number of cycles. The main tool is a bijection between permutations in standard cycle form and weighted Motzkin paths.

It is a long-standing open question to determine the minimum number of comparisons $S(n)$ that suffice to sort an array of $n$ elements. Indeed, before this work $S(n)$ has been known only for $n\leq 22$ with the exception for $n=16$, $17$,…

We consider the number of passes a permutation needs to take through a stack if we only pop the appropriate output values and start over with the remaining entries in their original order. We define a permutation $\pi$ to be $k$-pass…

Although many authors have considered how many ternary comparisons it takes to sort a multiset $S$ of size $n$, the best known upper and lower bounds still differ by a term linear in $n$. In this paper we restrict our attention to online…

We undertake a detailed investigation into the structure of permutations in monotone grid classes whose row-column graphs do not contain components with more than one cycle. Central to this investigation is a new decomposition, called the…

We give a positive answer to a question raised by Davis et al. ({\em Discrete Mathematics} 341, 2018), concerning permutations with the same pinnacle set. Given $\pi\in S_n$, a {\em pinnacle} of $\pi$ is an element $\pi_i$ ($i\neq 1,n$)…

We study the orbits under the natural action of a permutation group $G \subseteq S_n$ on the powerset $\mathscr{P}(\{1, \dots , n\})$. The permutation groups having exactly $n+1$ orbits on the powerset can be characterized as set-transitive…

We consider the classical problem of sorting an input array containing $n$ elements, where each element is described with a $k$-bit comparison-key and a $w$-bit payload. A long-standing open problem is whether there exist $(k + w) \cdot o(n…

Given integers $k\geq 2$ and $a_1,\ldots,a_k\geq 1$, let $\boldsymbol{a}:=(a_1,\ldots,a_k)$ and $n:=a_1+\cdots+a_k$. An $\boldsymbol{a}$-multiset permutation is a string of length $n$ that contains exactly $a_i$ symbols $i$ for each…

We give explicit low-rank bilinear non-commutative schemes for multiplying structured $n \times n$ matrices with $2 \leq n \leq 5$, which serve as building blocks for recursive algorithms with improved multiplicative factors in asymptotic…