A Flag Whitney Number Formula for Matroid Kazhdan-Lusztig Polynomials

For a representation of a matroid the combinatorially defined Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomial computes the intersection cohomology of the associated reciprocal plane. However, these polynomials are difficult to compute and there are numerous open conjectures about their structure. For example, it is unknown whether or not the coefficients are non-negative for non-representable matroids. The main result in this note is a combinatorial formula for the coefficients of these matroid Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials in terms of flag Whitney numbers. This formula gives insight into some vanishing behavior of the matroid Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials.

A GENERATING FUNCTION APPROACH TO THE SURFACE AREAS OF SOME INTERCONNECTION NETWORKS

An important and interesting parameter of an interconnection network is the number of vertices of a specific distance from a specific vertex. This is known as the surface area or the Whitney number of the second kind. In this paper, we give explicit formulas for the surface areas of the (n, k)-star graphs and the arrangement graphs via the generating function technique. As a direct consequence, these formulas will also provide such explicit formulas for the star graphs, the alternating group graphs and the split-stars since these graphs are related to the (n, k)-star graphs and the arrangement graphs. In addition, we derive the average distances for these graphs.