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In a seminal paper Richard Stanley derived Pieri rules for the Jack symmetric function basis. These rules were extended by Macdonald to his now famous symmetric function basis. The original form of these rules had a forbidding complexity that made them difficult to use in explicit calculations. In the early 90's it was discovered that, due to massive cancellations, the dual rule, which expresses skewing by $e_1$ the modified Macdonald polynomial ${\tilde H}_\mu[X;q,t]$, can be given a very simple combinatorial form in terms of corner weights of the Ferrers' diagram of $\mu$. A similar formula was later obtained by the last named author for the multiplication of ${\tilde H}_\mu[X;q,t]$ by $e_1$, but never published. In the years that followed we have seen some truly remarkable uses of these two Pieri rules in establishing highly non trivial combinatorial results in the Theory of Macdonald polynomials. This theory has recently been spectacularly enriched by various Algebraic Geometrical results in the works of Hikita, Schiffmann, Schiffmann-Vasserot, A. Negut and Gorsky-Negut. This development opens up the challenging task of deriving their results by purely Algebraic Combinatorial methods. In this paper we present the progress obtained by means of Pieri rules., Comment: TeX; 25 pages; for Stanley@70. Massachusetts institute of technology, June 23-27, 2014

We define new generalizations of (q,t)-Catalan numbers applying nabla operator on k-Schur functions indexed by column partitions. In some special cases, we give a combinatorial interpretation of these numbers using configurations of Dyck paths. In some other special cases, we also interpret these new polynomial as Hilbert series of explicit sub-modules of the alternating diagonal harmonics built using differential operators.

We introduce non-commutative analogues of $k$-Schur functions of Lapointe-Lascoux and Morse. We give an explicit formulas for the expansions of non-commutive functions with one and two parameters in terms of these new functions. These results are similar to the conjectures existing in the commutative case.

We construct a sequence of finite automata that accept subclasses of the class of 4231-avoiding permutations. We thereby show that the Wilf-Stanley limit for the class of 4231-avoiding permutations is bounded below by 9.35. This bound shows that this class has the largest such limit among all classes of permutations avoiding a single permutation of length 4 and refutes the conjecture that the Wilf-Stanley limit of a class of permutations avoiding a single permutation of length k cannot exceed (k-1)^2., Comment: Submitted to Advances in Applied Mathematics