This material has been published in
Mem. Amer. Math. Soc. 115,
no. 552, Providence, R. I., 1995,
the only definitive repository of the content that has been
certified and accepted after peer review. Copyright and all rights therein
are retained by the American Mathematical Society.
This material may not be copied or reposted
without explicit permission.
Christian Krattenthaler
The major counting of nonintersecting lattice paths and generating
functions for tableaux
Abstract.
A theory of counting nonintersecting lattice paths by the
major index and generalizations of it is developed. We obtain determinantal
expressions for the corresponding generating functions for families of
nonintersecting lattice paths with given starting points and given
final points, where the starting points lie on a line parallel to
x+y=0. In some cases these determinants can be evaluated to result
in simple products. As applications we compute the generating
function for tableaux with p odd rows, with at most c columns,
and with parts between 1 and n.
Besides, we compute the generating function for the same kind of
tableaux which in addition have only odd parts. We thus also obtain a
closed form for the generating function for symmetric plane
partitions with at most n rows, with parts between 1 and c, and
with p odd entries on the main diagonal. In each case the
result is a simple product. By summing with respect to p we provide
new proofs of the
Bender-Knuth
and MacMahon (ex-)Conjectures, which
were first proved
by Andrews, Gordon, and Macdonald. The link between nonintersecting
lattice paths and tableaux is given by variations of the Knuth
correspondence.
The following versions are available:
Back to Christian Krattenthaler's
home page.