Standard Young tableaux and colored Motzkin paths

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a notion of colored Motzkin paths and establish a bijection between the n-cell standard Young tableaux (SYT) of bounded height and the colored Motzkin paths of length n. This result not only gives a lattice path interpretation of the standard Young tableaux but also reveals an unexpected intrinsic relation between the set of SYTs with at most 2d+1 rows and the set of SYTs with at most 2d rows.