Related papers: Proof of a Conjecture on the Slit Plane Problem

Walks in the plane taking unit-length steps north and east from $(0,0)$ to $(n,n)$ never dropping below $y=x$ and parking cars subject to preferences are two intriguing ingredients in a formula conjectured in 2005, now famously known as the…

Let S be a finite subset of Z^2. A walk on the slit plane with steps in S is a sequence (0,0)=w_0, w_1, ..., w_n of points of Z^2 such that w_{i+1}-w_i belongs to S for all i, and none of the points w_i, i>0, lie on the half-line H= {(k,0):…

We present a computer-aided, yet fully rigorous, proof of Ira Gessel's tantalizingly simply-stated conjecture that the number of ways of walking $2n$ steps in the region $x+y \geq 0, y \geq 0$ of the square-lattice with unit steps in the…

We consider Gessel walks in the plane starting at the origin $(0, 0)$ remaining in the first quadrant $i, j \geq 0$ and made of West, North-East, East and South-West steps. Let $F(m; n_1, n_2)$ denote the number of these walks with exact…

In the first part of this paper, we enumerate exactly walks on the square lattice that start from the origin, but otherwise avoid the non positive horizontal half-axis. We call them "walks on the slit plane". We count them by their length,…

For a fixed unit vector $a=(a_1,a_2,\ldots,a_n)\in S^{n-1}$, we consider the $2^n$ sign vectors $\varepsilon=(\varepsilon^1,\varepsilon^2,\ldots,\varepsilon^n)\in \{+1,-1\}^n$ and the corresponding scalar products $\varepsilon\cdot…

Let F(m; n1, n2) denote the number of lattice walks from (0,0) to (n1,n2), always staying in the first quadrant {(n_1,n_2); n1 >= 0, n2 >= 0} and having exactly m steps, each of which belongs to the set {E=(1,0), W=(-1,0), NE=(1,1),…

Denote by $L_n$ the length of the perimeter of the convex hull of $n$ steps of a planar random walk whose increments have finite second moment and non-zero mean. Snyder and Steele showed that $n^{-1} L_n$ converges almost surely to a…

It is a classical result in combinatorics that among lattice paths with 2m steps U=(1,1) and D=(1,-1) starting at the origin, the number of those that do not go below the x-axis equals the number of those that end on the x-axis. A much more…

We interpret walks in the first quadrant with steps {(1,1),(1,0),(-1,0), (-1,-1)} as a generalization of Dyck words with two sets of letters. Using this language, we give a formal expression for the number of walks in the steps above…

For positive integers $\alpha$ and $\beta$, we define an $(\alpha,\beta)$-walk to be any sequence of positive integers satisfying $w_{k+2}=\alpha w_{k+1}+\beta w_k$. We say that an $(\alpha,\beta)$-walk is $n$-slow if $w_s=n$ with $s$ as…

The walk matrix of an $n$-vertex graph $G$ with adjacency matrix $A$, denoted by $W(G)$, is $[e,Ae,\ldots,A^{n-1}e]$, where $e$ is the all-ones vector. Let $G\circ P_m$ be the rooted product of $G$ and a rooted path $P_m$ (taking an…

In 1961, P. Erd\H{o}s, A. Ginzburg, and A. Ziv proved a remarkable theorem stating that each set of $2n-1$ integers contains a subset of size $n$, the sum of whose elements is divisible by $n$. We will prove a similar result for pairs of…

Let n and k be natural numbers and let S(n,k) denote the Stirling numbers of the second kind. It is a conjecture of Wilf that the alternating sum \sum_{j=0}^{n} (-1)^{j} S(n,j) is nonzero for all n>2. We prove this conjecture for all n not…

For a positive integer $n$, we study the number of steps to reach $n$ by a {\it Fibonacci walk} for some starting pair $a_1$ and $a_2$ satisfying the recurrence of $a_{k+2}=a_{k+1}+a_k$. The problem of slow Fibonacci walks, first suggested…

Let S be a subset of {-1,0,1}^2 not containing (0,0). We address the enumeration of plane lattice walks with steps in S, that start from (0,0) and always remain in the first quadrant. A priori, there are 2^8 problems of this type, but some…

The Erd\H{o}s-Szekeres conjecture states that any set of more than $2^{n-2}$ points in the plane with no three on a line contains the vertices of a convex $n$-gon. Erd\H{o}s, Tuza, and Valtr strengthened the conjecture by stating that any…

Consider a walk in the plane made of $n$ unit steps, with directions chosen independently and uniformly at random at each step. Rayleigh's theorem asserts that the probability for such a walk to end at a distance less than 1 from its…

The number of excursions (finite paths starting and ending at the origin) having a given number of steps and obeying various geometric constraints is a classical topic of combinatorics and probability theory. We prove that the sequence…

We consider planar lattice walks that start from (0,0), remain inthe first quadrant i, j >= 0, and are made of three types of steps: North-East, West and South. These walks are known to have remarkable enumerative and probabilistic…