Necklaces over a group with identity product
Abstract
We address two variants of the classical necklace counting problem from enumerative combinatorics. In both cases, we fix a finite group and a positive integer . In the first variant, we count the ``identity-product -necklaces'' -- that is, the orbits of -tuples that satisfy under cyclic rotation. In the second, we count the orbits of all -tuples under cyclic rotation and left multiplication (i.e., the operation of on given by ). We prove bijectively that both answers are the same, and express them as a sum over divisors of . Consequently, we generalize the first problem to -necklaces whose product of entries lies in a given subset of (closed under conjugation), and we connect a particular case to the enumeration of irreducible polynomials over a finite field with given degree and second-highest coefficient .
Cite
@article{arxiv.2405.08937,
title = {Necklaces over a group with identity product},
author = {Darij Grinberg and Peter Mao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.08937},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
34 pages. v3 fixes some typos and improves the wording slightly. Comments are welcome!