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We consider the number of occurrences of subwords (non-consecutive sub-sequences) in a given word. We first define the notion of subword entropy of a given word that measures the maximal number of occurrences among all possible subwords. We then give upper and lower bounds of minimal subword entropy for words of fixed length in a fixed alphabet, and also showing that minimal subword entropy per letter has a limit value. A better upper bound of minimal subword entropy for a binary alphabet is then given by looking at certain families of periodic words. We also give some conjectures based on experimental observations, Comment: Extended abstract accepted by 35th International Conference on Probabilistic, Combinatorial and Asymptotic Methods for the Analysis of Algorithms (AofA 2024). Comments are welcome

We introduce a simple bijection between Tamari intervals and the blossoming trees (Poulalhon and Schaeffer, 2006) encoding planar triangulations, using a new meandering representation of such trees. Its specializations to the families of synchronized, Kreweras, new/modern, and infinitely modern intervals give a combinatorial proof of the counting formula for each family. Compared to (Bernardi and Bonichon, 2009), our bijection behaves well with the duality of Tamari intervals, enabling also the counting of self-dual intervals., Comment: 37 pages

In a recent preprint, Matherne, Morales and Selover conjectured that two different representations of unit interval posets are related by the famous zeta map in $q,t$-Catalan combinatorics. This conjecture was proved recently by G\'elinas, Segovia and Thomas using induction. In this short note, we provide a bijective proof of the same conjecture with a reformulation of the zeta map using left-aligned colored trees, first proposed in the study of parabolic Tamari lattices., Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures. Accepted by Discrete Mathematics & Theoretical Computer Science

Weird numbers are abundant numbers that are not pseudoperfect. Since their introduction, the existence of odd weird numbers has been an open problem. In this work, we describe our computational effort to search for odd weird numbers, which shows their non-existence up to $10^{21}$. We also searched up to $10^{28}$ for numbers with an abundance below $10^{14}$, to no avail. Our approach to speed up the search can be viewed as an application of reverse search in the domain of combinatorial optimization, and may be useful for other similar quest for natural numbers with special properties that depend crucially on their factorization., Comment: 8 pages

The enumeration of linear $\lambda$-terms has attracted quite some attention recently, partly due to their link to combinatorial maps. Zeilberger and Giorgetti (2015) gave a recursive bijection between planar linear normal $\lambda$-terms and planar maps, which, when restricted to 2-connected $\lambda$-terms (i.e., without closed sub-terms), leads to bridgeless planar maps. Inspired by this restriction, Zeilberger and Reed (2019) conjectured that 3-connected planar linear normal $\lambda$-terms have the same counting formula as bipartite planar maps. In this article, we settle this conjecture by giving a direct bijection between these two families. Furthermore, using a similar approach, we give a direct bijection between planar linear normal $\lambda$-terms and planar maps, whose restriction to 2-connected $\lambda$-terms leads to loopless planar maps. This bijection seems different from that of Zeilberger and Giorgetti, even after taking the map dual. We also explore enumerative consequences of our bijections., Comment: 22 pages, 6 figures. Accepted by Adv. Appl. Math

We study parabolic aligned elements associated with the type-$B$ Coxeter group and the so-called linear Coxeter element. These elements were introduced algebraically in (M\"uhle and Williams, 2019) for parabolic quotients of finite Coxeter groups and were characterized by a certain forcing condition on inversions. We focus on the type-$B$ case and give a combinatorial model for these elements in terms of pattern avoidance. Moreover, we describe an equivalence relation on parabolic quotients of the type-$B$ Coxeter group whose equivalence classes are indexed by the aligned elements. We prove that this equivalence relation extends to a congruence relation for the weak order. The resulting quotient lattice is the type-$B$ analogue of the parabolic Tamari lattice introduced for type $A$ in (M\"uhle and Williams, 2019). These lattices have not appeared in the literature before., Comment: 43 pages, 9 figures. Comments are very welcome

Initiated by Davis, Nelson, Petersen and Tenner (2018), the enumerative study of pinnacle sets of permutations has attracted a fair amount of attention recently. In this article, we provide a recurrence that can be used to compute efficiently the number $|\mathfrak{S}_n(P)|$ of permutations of size $n$ with a given pinnacle set $P$, with arithmetic complexity $O(k^4 + k\log n)$ for $P$ of size $k$. A symbolic expression can also be computed in this way for pinnacle sets of fixed size. A weighted sum $q_n(P)$ of $|\mathfrak{S}_n(P)|$ proposed in Davis, Nelson, Petersen and Tenner (2018) seems to have a simple form, and a conjectural form is given recently by Flaque, Novelli and Thibon (2021+). We settle the problem by providing and proving an alternative form of $q_n(P)$, which has a strong combinatorial flavor. We also study admissible orderings of a given pinnacle set, first considered by Rusu (2020) and characterized by Rusu and Tenner (2021), and we give an efficient algorithm for their counting., Comment: 18 pages, 1 figure

In this article we define an encoding for parabolic permutations that distinguishes between parabolic $231$-avoiding permutations. We prove that the componentwise order on these codes realizes the parabolic Tamari lattice, and conclude a direct and simple proof that the parabolic Tamari lattice is isomorphic to a certain $\nu$-Tamari lattice, with an explicit bijection. Furthermore, we prove that this bijection is closely related to the map $\Theta$ used when the lattice isomorphism was first proved in (Ceballos, Fang and M\"uhle, 2020), settling an open problem therein., Comment: 26 pages, 2 tables, 9 figures. Comments are welcome. In version 2, we added a new section concerning Tamari lattices via Dyck paths, and show that our bijection is related to a well-known map exchanging two sequence statistics

Given an Eulerian digraph, we consider the genus distribution of its face-oriented embeddings. We prove that such distribution is log-concave for two families of Eulerian digraphs, thus giving a positive answer for these families to a question asked in Bonnington, Conder, Morton and McKenna (2002). Our proof uses real-rooted polynomials and the representation theory of the symmetric group $\mathbb{S}_n$. The result is also extended to some factorizations of the identity in $\mathbb{S}_n$ that are rotation systems of some families of one-face constellations., Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables, submitted

We examine the asymptotics of a class of banded plane partitions under a varying bandwidth parameter $m$, and clarify the transitional behavior for large size $n$ and increasing $m=m(n)$ to be from $c_1 n^{-1} \exp(c_2 n^{1/2})$ to $c_3 n^{-49/72} \exp(c_4 n^{2/3} + c_5 n^{1/3})$ for some explicit coefficients $c_1, \ldots, c_5$. The method of proof, which is a unified saddle-point analysis for all phases, is general and can be extended to other classes of plane partitions., Comment: 32 pages, 4 figures, submitted

In 2006, Chapoton defined a class of Tamari intervals called "new intervals" in his enumeration of Tamari intervals, and he found that these new intervals are equi-enumerated with bipartite planar maps. We present here a direct bijection between these two classes of objects using a new object called "degree tree". Our bijection also gives an intuitive proof of an unpublished equi-distribution result of some statistics on new intervals given by Chapoton and Fusy., Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures, extended abstract submitted to FPSAC 2020. To appear on European J. Combin. 97 (2021)

A compacted binary tree is a directed acyclic graph encoding a binary tree in which common subtrees are factored and shared, such that they are represented only once. We show that the number of compacted binary trees of size $n$ grows asymptotically like $$\Theta\left( n! \, 4^n e^{3a_1n^{1/3}} n^{3/4} \right),$$ where $a_1\approx-2.338$ is the largest root of the Airy function. Our method involves a new two parameter recurrence which yields an algorithm of quadratic arithmetic complexity. We use empirical methods to estimate the values of all terms defined by the recurrence, then we prove by induction that these estimates are sufficiently accurate for large $n$ to determine the asymptotic form. Our results also lead to new bounds on the number of minimal finite automata recognizing a finite language on a binary alphabet. As a consequence, these also exhibit a stretched exponential., Comment: 37 pages, 14 figures. Version accepted for publication

The absolute separation of a polynomial is the minimum nonzero difference between the absolute values of its roots. In the case of polynomials with integer coefficients, it can be bounded from below in terms of the degree and the height (the maximum absolute value of the coefficients) of the polynomial. We improve the known bounds for this problem and related ones. Then we report on extensive experiments in low degrees, suggesting that the current bounds are still very pessimistic.

As a classical object, the Tamari lattice has many generalizations, including $\nu$-Tamari lattices and parabolic Tamari lattices. In this article, we unify these generalizations in a bijective fashion. We first prove that parabolic Tamari lattices are isomorphic to $\nu$-Tamari lattices for bounce paths $\nu$. We then introduce a new combinatorial object called `left-aligned colorable tree', and show that it provides a bijective bridge between various parabolic Catalan objects and certain nested pairs of Dyck paths. As a consequence, we prove the Steep-Bounce Conjecture using a generalization of the famous zeta map in $q,t$-Catalan combinatorics. A generalization of the zeta map on parking functions, which arises in the theory of diagonal harmonics, is also obtained as a labeled version of our bijection., Comment: 51 pages, 23 figures (2 not numbered). An extended abstract of the current article is accepted by FPSAC 2019. Minor fixes. Accepted by J. Combin. Theory Ser. A

In the binomial random graph $\mathcal{G}(n,p)$, when $p$ changes from $(1-\varepsilon)/n$ (subcritical case) to $1/n$ and then to $(1+\varepsilon)/n$ (supercritical case) for $\varepsilon>0$, with high probability the order of the largest component increases smoothly from $O(\varepsilon^{-2}\log(\varepsilon^3 n))$ to $\Theta(n^{2/3})$ and then to $(1 \pm o(1)) 2 \varepsilon n$. As a natural generalisation of random graphs and connectedness, we consider the binomial random $k$-uniform hypergraph $\mathcal{H}^k(n,p)$ (where each $k$-tuple of vertices is present as a hyperedge with probability $p$ independently) and the following notion of high-order connectedness. Given an integer $1 \leq j \leq k-1$, two sets of $j$ vertices are called \emph{$j$-connected} if there is a walk of hyperedges between them such that any two consecutive hyperedges intersect in at least $j$ vertices. A $j$-connected component is a maximal collection of pairwise $j$-connected $j$-tuples of vertices. Recently, the threshold for the appearance of the giant $j$-connected component in $\mathcal{H}^k(n,p)$ and its order were determined. In this article, we take a closer look at the subcritical random hypergraph. We determine the structure, order, and size of the largest $j$-connected components, with the help of a certain class of `hypertrees' and related objects. In our proofs, we combine various probabilistic and enumerative techniques, such as generating functions and couplings with branching processes. Our study will pave the way to establishing a symmetry between the subcritical random hypergraph and the hypergraph obtained from the supercritical random hypergraph by deleting its giant $j$-connected component., Comment: 27 pages

The Tamari lattice, defined on Catalan objects such as binary trees and Dyck paths, is a well-studied poset in combinatorics. It is thus natural to try to extend it to other families of lattice paths. In this article, we fathom such a possibility by defining and studying an analogy of the Tamari lattice on Motzkin paths. While our generalization is not a lattice, each of its connected components is isomorphic to an interval in the classical Tamari lattice. With this structural result, we proceed to the enumeration of components and intervals in the poset of Motzkin paths we defined. We also extend the structural and enumerative results to Schr\"oder paths. We conclude by a discussion on the relation between our work and that of Baril and Pallo (2014)., Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures. Accepted by Discrete Mathematics

In 2017, Duchi, Guerrini, Rinaldi and Schaeffer proposed a new family of combinatorial objects called "fighting fish", which are counted by the same formula as more classical objects, such as two-stack sortable permutations and non-separable planar maps. In this article, we explore the bijective aspect of fighting fish by establishing a bijection to two-stack sortable permutations, using a new recursive decomposition of these permutations. With our bijection, we give combinatorial explanations of several results on fighting fish proved previously with generating functions. Using the decomposition of two-stack sortable permutations, we also prove the algebraicity of their generating function, extending a result of Bousquet-M\'elou (1998)., Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures. Published in Proceedings of FPSAC 2018. Current version with minor modification

The dual of a map is a fundamental construction on combinatorial maps, but many other combinatorial objects also possess their notion of duality. For instance, the Tamari lattice is isomorphic to its order dual, which induces an involution on the set of so-called "synchronized intervals" introduced by Pr\'eville-Ratelle and the present author. Another example is the class of $\beta$-(1,0) trees, which has a mysterious involution $h$ proposed by Claesson, Kitaev and Steingr\'imsson (2009). These two classes of combinatorial objects are all in bijection with the class of non-separable planar maps, which is closed by map duality. In this article, we show that we can identify the notions of duality in these three classes of objects using previously known natural bijections, which leads to a bijective proof of a result from Kitaev and de Mier (2013). We also discuss how various statistics are transferred by duality and by the bijections we used., Comment: 29 pages, 22 figures, submitted

We present a direct bijection between planar 3-connected triangulations and bridgeless planar maps, which were first enumerated by Tutte (1962) and Walsh and Lehman (1975) respectively. Previously known bijections by Wormald (1980) and Fusy (2010) are all defined recursively. Our direct bijection passes by a new class of combinatorial objects called "sticky trees". We also present bijections between sticky trees, intervals in the Tamari lattices and closed flows on forests. With our bijections, we recover several known enumerative results about these objects. We thus show that sticky trees can serve as a nexus of bijective links among all these equi-enumerated objects., Comment: 23 pages, 11 figures, published

This thesis deals with the enumerative study of combinatorial maps, and its application to the enumeration of other combinatorial objects. Combinatorial maps, or simply maps, form a rich combinatorial model. They have an intuitive and geometric definition, but are also related to some deep algebraic structures. For instance, a special type of maps called constellations provides a unifying framework for some enumeration problems concerning factorizations in the symmetric group. Standing on a position where many domains meet, maps can be studied using a large variety of methods, and their enumeration can also help us count other combinatorial objects. This thesis is a sampling from the rich results and connections in the enumeration of maps. This thesis is structured into four major parts. The first part, including Chapter 1 and 2, consist of an introduction to the enumerative study of maps. The second part, Chapter 3 and 4, contains my work in the enumeration of constellations, which are a special type of maps that can serve as a unifying model of some factorizations of the identity in the symmetric group. The third part, composed by Chapter 5 and 6, shows my research on the enumerative link from maps to other combinatorial objects, such as generalizations of the Tamari lattice and random graphs embeddable onto surfaces. The last part is the closing chapter, in which the thesis concludes with some perspectives and future directions in the enumerative study of maps., Comment: PhD thesis. 221 pages, 65 figures. Summarizes (thus potentially with text-overlaps to) arXiv:1311.6991 (in Chapter 3), arXiv:1502.06239 (in Chapter 4), arXiv:1511.05937 (in Chapter 5), arXiv:1603.01440 (in Chapter 6). Comments are welcomed

Let $\mathbb{S}_g$ be the orientable surface of genus $g$. We show that the number of vertex-labelled cubic multigraphs embeddable on $\mathbb{S}_g$ with $2n$ vertices is asymptotically $c_g n^{5(g-1)/2-1}\gamma^{2n}(2n)!$, where $\gamma$ is an algebraic constant and $c_g$ is a constant depending only on the genus $g$. We also derive an analogous result for simple cubic graphs and weighted cubic multigraphs. Additionally we prove that a typical cubic multigraph embeddable on $\mathbb{S}_g$, $g\ge 1$, has exactly one non-planar component., Comment: 50 pages. An extended abstract of this paper has been published in the Proceedings of the European Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Applications (EuroComb15), Electronic Notes in Discrete Mathematics (2015), 603--610

Let $v$ be a grid path made of north and east steps. The lattice $\rm{T{\scriptsize AM}}(v)$, based on all grid paths weakly above $v$ and sharing the same endpoints as $v$, was introduced by Pr\'eville-Ratelle and Viennot (2014) and corresponds to the usual Tamari lattice in the case $v=(NE)^n$. Our main contribution is that the enumeration of intervals in $\rm{T{\scriptsize AM}}(v)$, over all $v$ of length $n$, is given by $\frac{2 (3n+3)!}{(n+2)! (2n+3)!}$. This formula was first obtained by Tutte(1963) for the enumeration of non-separable planar maps. Moreover, we give an explicit bijection from these intervals in $\rm{T{\scriptsize AM}}(v)$ to non-separable planar maps., Comment: 19 pages, 11 figures. Title changed, originally titled "From generalized Tamari intervals to non-separable planar maps (extended abstract)", submitted