Pattern avoidance for alternating permutations and reading words of tableaux

Abstract

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mathematics, 2012.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 67-69).We consider a variety of questions related to pattern avoidance in alternating permutations and generalizations thereof. We give bijective enumerations of alternating permutations avoiding patterns of length 3 and 4, of permutations that are the reading words of a "thickened staircase" shape (or equivalently of permutations with descent set {k, 2k, 3k, . . .}) avoiding a monotone pattern, and of the reading words of Young tableaux of any skew shape avoiding any of the patterns 132, 213, 312, or 231. Our bijections include a simple bijection involving binary trees, variations on the Robinson-Schensted-Knuth correspondence, and recursive bijections established via isomorphisms of generating trees.by Joel Brewster Lewis.Ph.D