English

Updown categories: Generating functions and universal covers

Combinatorics 2016-02-11 v1

Abstract

A poset can be regarded as a category in which there is at most one morphism between objects, and such that at most one of Hom(c,c') and Hom(c',c) is nonempty for distinct objects c,c'. If we keep in place the latter axiom but allow for more than one morphism between objects, we have a sort of generalized poset in which there are multiplicities attached to covering relations, and possibly nontrivial automorphism groups. We call such a category an "updown category". In this paper we give a precise definition of such categories and develop a theory for them. We also give a detailed account of ten examples, including updown categories of integer partitions, integer compositions, planar rooted trees, and rooted trees.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1207.1705,
  title  = {Updown categories: Generating functions and universal covers},
  author = {Michael E. Hoffman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1207.1705},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:math/0402450

R2 v1 2026-06-21T21:32:01.296Z