Combinatorial Classes, Generating Functions and a Grothendieck Invariant Laurent Poinsot1 1 Université Paris 13, Sorbonne Paris Cité LIPN, CNRS (UMR 7030) F-93430 Villetaneuse France
[email protected] Abstract The symbolic method, introduced by P. Flajolet and R. Sedgewick to compute (ordinary, expo- nential, and multivariate) generating functions in a systematic way, makes use of basic objects and some construction rules – which, for certain of them, are shown to be functorial in the present contribution – to combine them in order to obtain more complex objects of the same kind (combin- atorial classes) so that their generating functions are computed in a way (actually also functorial) that reflects these combinations. In this paper, in which we adopt a functorial point of view, is provided a more general framework to study these objects, allowing transfinite cardinalities. We prove that the functional (actually functorial) association of a class to its generating function is a universal (Grothendieck) invariant. Finally we also present some constructions of (combinatorial or not) classes that extend the known ones by application of universal algebra. MSC 2010 Subject Classification 05A99, 18D35, 03E10 Keywords and phrases Combinatorial class Transfinite cardinal number Internal monoid 1 Introduction As described in [8], a combinatorial class is a collection C of objects of a similar kind (e.g. words, trees, graphs), endowed with a suitable notion of size or weight (whatever it is, for instance p: C → N) in a way that there are only finitely many objects of each size, i.e., −1 |p ({ n })| < ℵ0 for all n ∈ N. These collections are therefore subject to an enumeration: counting the number of objects of size n (to make simpler the presentation), for every integer n, completely describes their combinatorial content which is summarized under the form X of formal power series, traditionally referred to as generating functions, |p−1({ n })|xn.