Mathematics Colloquia and Seminars

Return to Colloquia & Seminar listing

Euler-Mahonian Statistics via Polyhedral Geometry

Algebra & Discrete Mathematics

Speaker: Ben Braun, University of Kentucky
Location: 2112 MSB
Start time: Tue, May 15 2012, 2:10PM

A variety of descent and major-index statistics have been defined for symmetric groups, hyperoctahedral groups, and their generalizations. Typically associated to pairs of such statistics is an Euler-Mahonian distribution, a bivariate generating function identity encoding these statistics. We use techniques from polyhedral geometry to establish new multivariate generalizations for many of the known Euler-Mahonian distributions. The original bivariate distributions are then straightforward specializations of these multivariate identities. A consequence of these new techniques are bijective proofs of the equivalence of the bivariate distributions for various pairs of statistics. This is joint work with Matthias Beck.