English

Enumeration of Stack-Sorting Preimages via a Decomposition Lemma

Combinatorics 2023-06-22 v3

Abstract

We give three applications of a recently-proven "Decomposition Lemma," which allows one to count preimages of certain sets of permutations under West's stack-sorting map ss. We first enumerate the permutation class s1(Av(231,321))=Av(2341,3241,45231)s^{-1}(\text{Av}(231,321))=\text{Av}(2341,3241,45231), finding a new example of an unbalanced Wilf equivalence. This result is equivalent to the enumeration of permutations sortable by Bs{\bf B}\circ s, where B{\bf B} is the bubble sort map. We then prove that the sets s1(Av(231,312))s^{-1}(\text{Av}(231,312)), s1(Av(132,231))=Av(2341,1342,3241,3142)s^{-1}(\text{Av}(132,231))=\text{Av}(2341,1342,\underline{32}41,\underline{31}42), and s1(Av(132,312))=Av(1342,3142,3412,3421)s^{-1}(\text{Av}(132,312))=\text{Av}(1342,3142,3412,34\underline{21}) are counted by the so-called "Boolean-Catalan numbers," settling a conjecture of the current author and another conjecture of Hossain. This completes the enumerations of all sets of the form s1(Av(τ(1),,τ(r)))s^{-1}(\text{Av}(\tau^{(1)},\ldots,\tau^{(r)})) for {τ(1),,τ(r)}S3\{\tau^{(1)},\ldots,\tau^{(r)}\}\subseteq S_3 with the exception of the set {321}\{321\}. We also find an explicit formula for s1(Avn,k(231,312,321))|s^{-1}(\text{Av}_{n,k}(231,312,321))|, where Avn,k(231,312,321)\text{Av}_{n,k}(231,312,321) is the set of permutations in Avn(231,312,321)\text{Av}_n(231,312,321) with kk descents. This allows us to prove a conjectured identity involving Catalan numbers and order ideals in Young's lattice.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1904.02829,
  title  = {Enumeration of Stack-Sorting Preimages via a Decomposition Lemma},
  author = {Colin Defant},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.02829},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

20 pages, 4 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1903.09138

R2 v1 2026-06-23T08:29:54.920Z