A New Bijective Proof of Babson and Steingrímsson's Conjecture

Abstract

Babson and Steingrímsson introduced generalized permutation patterns and showed that most of the Mahonian statistics in the literature can be expressed by the combination of generalized pattern functions. Particularly, they defined a new Mahonian statistic in terms of generalized pattern functions, which is denoted $stat$. Given a permutation $\pi$, let $des(\pi)$ denote the descent number of $\pi$ and $maj(\pi)$ denote the major index of $\pi$. Babson and Steingrímsson conjectured that $(des,stat)$ and $(des,maj)$ are equidistributed on $S_n$. Foata and Zeilberger settled this conjecture using q-enumeration, generating functions and Maple packages ROTA and PERCY. Later, Burstein provided a bijective proof of a refinement of this conjecture. In this paper, we give a new bijective proof of this conjecture.