On a conjecture of Lin and Kim concerning a refinement of Schröder numbers

Abstract. In this paper, we compute the distribution of the first letter statistic on nine avoidance classes of permutations corresponding to two pairs of patterns of length four. In particular, we show that the distribution is the same for each class and is given by the entries of a new Schröder number triangle. This answers in the affirmative a recent conjecture of Lin and Kim. We employ a variety of techniques to prove our results, including generating trees, direct bijections and the kernel method. For the latter, we make use of in a creative way what we are trying to show in three cases to aid in solving a system of functional equations satisfied by the associated generating functions.