The Theory of Compositionals
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Elsevier - Publisher Connector Discrete Mathematics 122 (1993) 59-87 59 North-Holland The theory of compositionals William Y.C. Chen C-3. Mail Stop 8265, Los Alanm Nationul Lahorutor_v, Los Alumos, NM 87545. USA Received 13 December 1991 Abstract By introducing the notion of compositionals we obtain a combinatorial interpretation of plethysm of formal power series in infinitely many variables. The following related problems are studied: P6lya’s theorem on the plethysm of cycle indices, plethystic inverse, the inverse of a sequence of delta series, the plethystic analog of the partition lattice, the reduced incidence algebra of the plethystic lattice, and the plethystic Hopf algebra. We also introduce plethystic trees, enriched plethystic trees and plethystic Schriider trees. An involution for plethystic Schroder trees is devised, which leads to a combinatorial expansion for the plethystic inverse of a series _j’(.xl, x2, .) containing the factor x1. 1. Introduction Formal power series in infinitely many variables arise naturally in enumerative combinatorics, especially in enumeration problems related to the symmetric group. The composition or plethysm of two series in many variables is defined as follows. Let f(xr ) x2, . .) and g(x1 ,x2, . ) be the two series such that g(xr , x2, . .) has no constant term, then the plethysm of ,f and g is given by fCd(xI>xz> ... )=f‘(g,(x,,.~,,...),g,(x,,x,,...), . ..). where gk(x1x2, ...)=g(xk,x2k,x3k, . ..). A series without constant term will be called a delta series. For simplicity, we shall writef(g(xr,x,, .
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