Title
A simple model of trees for unicellular maps
Abstract
We consider unicellular maps, or polygon gluings, of fixed genus. A few years ago the first author gave a recursive bijection transforming unicellular maps into trees, explaining the presence of Catalan numbers in counting formulas for these objects. In this paper, we give another bijection that explicitly describes the ''recursive part'' of the first bijection. As a result we obtain a very simple description of unicellular maps as pairs made by a plane tree and a permutation-like structure. All the previously known formulas follow as an immediate corollary or easy exercise, thus giving a bijective proof for each of them, in a unified way. For some of these formulas, this is the first bijective proof, e.g. the Harer-Zagier recurrence formula, the Lehman-Walsh formula and the Goupil-Schaeffer formula. We also discuss several applications of our construction: we obtain a new proof of an identity related to covered maps due to Bernardi and the first author, and thanks to previous work of the second author, we give a new expression for Stanley character polynomials, which evaluate irreducible characters of the symmetric group. Finally, we show that our techniques apply partially to unicellular 3-constellations and to related objects that we call quasi-3-constellations.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1016/j.jcta.2013.08.003
J. Comb. Theory, Ser. A
Keywords
Field
DocType
recursive bijection,lehman-walsh formula,bijective proof,simple model,unicellular map,recursive part,new proof,new expression,goupil-schaeffer formula,related object,harer-zagier recurrence formula,bijection
Discrete mathematics,Combinatorics,Polygon,Bijection,Symmetric group,Polynomial,Catalan number,Bijective proof,Corollary,Recursion,Mathematics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
120
8
Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A 120, 8 (2013) Pages 2064-2092
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.36
19
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Guillaume Chapuy17311.25
Valentin Féray252.87
íric Fusy3514.32