Growth diagrams, and increasing and decreasing chains in fillings of Ferrers shapes

Abstract

We put recent results by Chen, Deng, Du, Stanley and Yan on crossings and nestings of matchings and set partitions in the larger context of the enumeration of fillings of Ferrers shape on which one imposes restrictions on their increasing and decreasing chains. While Chen et al. work with Robinson–Schensted-like insertion/deletion algorithms, we use the growth diagram construction of Fomin to obtain our results. We extend the results by Chen et al., which, in the language of fillings, are results about 0-1-fillings, to arbitrary fillings. Finally, we point out that, very likely, these results are part of a bigger picture which also includes recent results of Jonsson on 0-1-fillings of stack polyominoes, and of results of Backelin, West and Xin and of Bousquet-Mélou and Steingrímsson on the enumeration of permutations and involutions with restricted patterns. In particular, we show that our growth diagram bijections do in fact provide alternative proofs of the results by Backelin, West and Xin and by Bousquet-Mélou and Steingrímsson.