On a Conjecture Concerning Shuffle-Compatible Permutation Statistics

Abstract

The notion of shuffle-compatible permutation statistics was implicit in Stanley's work on P-partitions and was first explicitly studied by Gessel and Zhuang. The aim of this paper is to prove that the triple ${\rm (udr, pk, des)}$ is shuffle-compatible as conjectured by Gessel and Zhuang, where ${\rm udr}$ denotes the number of up-down runs, ${\rm pk}$ denotes the peak number, and ${\rm des}$ denotes the descent number. This is accomplished by establishing an ${\rm (udr, pk, des)}$-preserving bijection in the spirit of Baker-Jarvis and Sagan's bijective proofs of the shuffle compatibility property of permutation statistics.