English

Descents in $t$-Sorted Permutations

Combinatorics 2019-07-02 v2

Abstract

Let ss denote West's stack-sorting map. A permutation is called tsortedt-\textit{sorted} if it is of the form st(μ)s^t(\mu) for some permutation μ\mu. We prove that the maximum number of descents that a tt-sorted permutation of length nn can have is nt2\left\lfloor\frac{n-t}{2}\right\rfloor. When nn and tt have the same parity and t2t\geq 2, we give a simple characterization of those tt-sorted permutations in SnS_n that attain this maximum. In particular, the number of such permutations is (nt1)!!(n-t-1)!!.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1904.02613,
  title  = {Descents in $t$-Sorted Permutations},
  author = {Colin Defant},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.02613},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

11 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T08:29:27.083Z