English

The M\"obius function of the consecutive pattern poset

Combinatorics 2011-03-02 v1

Abstract

An occurrence of a consecutive permutation pattern pp in a permutation π\pi is a segment of consecutive letters of π\pi whose values appear in the same order of size as the letters in pp. The set of all permutations forms a poset with respect to such pattern containment. We compute the M\"obius function of intervals in this poset, providing what may be called a complete solution to the problem. For most intervals our results give an immediate answer to the question. In the remaining cases, we give a polynomial time algorithm to compute the M\"obius function. In particular, we show that the M\"obius function only takes the values -1, 0 and 1.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1103.0173,
  title  = {The M\"obius function of the consecutive pattern poset},
  author = {Antonio Bernini and Luca Ferrari and Einar Steingrimsson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1103.0173},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

10 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T17:33:35.613Z