English

The Order of the (123, 132)-Avoiding Stack Sort

Combinatorics 2024-05-06 v1

Abstract

Let ss be West's deterministic stack-sorting map. A well-known result (West) is that any length nn permutation can be sorted with n1n-1 iterations of s.s. In 2020, Defant introduced the notion of highly-sorted permutations -- permutations in st(Sn)s^t(S_n) for tn1.t \lessapprox n-1. In 2023, Choi and Choi extended this notion to generalized stack-sorting maps sσ,s_{\sigma}, where we relax the condition of becoming sorted to the analogous condition of becoming periodic with respect to sσ.s_{\sigma}. In this work, we introduce the notion of minimally-sorted permutations Mn\mathfrak{M}_n as an antithesis to Defant's highly-sorted permutations, and show that ords123,132(Sn)=2n12,\text{ord}_{s_{123, 132}}(S_n) = 2 \lfloor \frac{n-1}{2} \rfloor, strengthening Berlow's 2021 classification of periodic points.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2405.01854,
  title  = {The Order of the (123, 132)-Avoiding Stack Sort},
  author = {Owen Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.01854},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:15:08.051Z