Euler–Mahonian statistics on ordered set partitions (II)

Abstract

[E. Steingrímsson, Statistics on ordered partitions of sets, arXiv: math.CO/0605670] introduced several hard statistics on ordered set partitions and conjectured that their generating functions are related to the q-Stirling numbers of the second kind. In a previous paper, half of these conjectures have been proved by Ishikawa, Kasraoui and Zeng using the transfer-matrix method. In this paper, we shall give bijective proofs of all the conjectures of Steingrímsson. Our basic idea is to encode ordered set partitions by a kind of path diagrams and explore the rich combinatorial properties of the latter structure. As a bonus of our approach, we derive two new σ-partition interpretations of the p , q -Stirling numbers of the second kind introduced by Wachs and White. We also discuss the connections with MacMahon's theorem on the equidistribution of the inversion number and major index on words and give a partition version of his result.