{"title":"Links and the Diaconis–Graham Inequality","authors":"Christopher Cornwell, Nathan McNew","doi":"10.1007/s00493-024-00107-1","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>In 1977 Diaconis and Graham proved two inequalities relating different measures of disarray in permutations, and asked for a characterization of those permutations for which equality holds in one of these inequalities. Such a characterization was first given in 2013. Recently, another characterization was given by Woo, using a topological link in <span>\\({\\mathbb {R}}^3\\)</span> that can be associated to the cycle diagram of a permutation. We show that Woo’s characterization extends much further: for any permutation, the discrepancy in Diaconis and Graham’s inequality is directly related to the Euler characteristic of the associated link. This connection provides a new proof of the original result of Diaconis and Graham. We also characterize permutations with a fixed discrepancy in terms of their associated links and find that the stabilized-interval-free permutations are precisely those whose associated links are nonsplit.</p>","PeriodicalId":50666,"journal":{"name":"Combinatorica","volume":"23 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0000,"publicationDate":"2024-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Combinatorica","FirstCategoryId":"100","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s00493-024-00107-1","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"数学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"MATHEMATICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
In 1977 Diaconis and Graham proved two inequalities relating different measures of disarray in permutations, and asked for a characterization of those permutations for which equality holds in one of these inequalities. Such a characterization was first given in 2013. Recently, another characterization was given by Woo, using a topological link in \({\mathbb {R}}^3\) that can be associated to the cycle diagram of a permutation. We show that Woo’s characterization extends much further: for any permutation, the discrepancy in Diaconis and Graham’s inequality is directly related to the Euler characteristic of the associated link. This connection provides a new proof of the original result of Diaconis and Graham. We also characterize permutations with a fixed discrepancy in terms of their associated links and find that the stabilized-interval-free permutations are precisely those whose associated links are nonsplit.
期刊介绍:
COMBINATORICA publishes research papers in English in a variety of areas of combinatorics and the theory of computing, with particular emphasis on general techniques and unifying principles. Typical but not exclusive topics covered by COMBINATORICA are
- Combinatorial structures (graphs, hypergraphs, matroids, designs, permutation groups).
- Combinatorial optimization.
- Combinatorial aspects of geometry and number theory.
- Algorithms in combinatorics and related fields.
- Computational complexity theory.
- Randomization and explicit construction in combinatorics and algorithms.