Hook formulas for skew shapes

International audience The celebrated hook-length formula gives a product formula for the number of standard Young tableaux of a straight shape. In 2014, Naruse announced a more general formula for the number of standard Young tableaux of skew shapes as a positive sum over excited diagrams of products of hook-lengths. We give two q-analogues of Naruse's formula for the skew Schur functions and for counting reverse plane partitions of skew shapes. We also apply our results to border strip shapes and their generalizations.

Schur $P$-positivity and Involution Stanley Symmetric Functions

The involution Stanley symmetric functions$\hat{F}_y$ are the stable limits of the analogs of Schubert polynomials for the orbits of the orthogonal group in the flag variety. These symmetric functions are also generating functions for involution words and are indexed by the involutions in the symmetric group. By construction, each $\hat{F}_y$ is a sum of Stanley symmetric functions and therefore Schur positive. We prove the stronger fact that these power series are Schur $P$-positive. We give an algorithm to efficiently compute the decomposition of $\hat{F}_y$ into Schur $P$-summands and prove that this decomposition is triangular with respect to the dominance order on partitions. As an application, we derive pattern avoidance conditions which characterize the involution Stanley symmetric functions which are equal to Schur $P$-functions. We deduce as a corollary that the involution Stanley symmetric function of the reverse permutation is a Schur $P$-function indexed by a shifted staircase shape. These results lead to alternate proofs of theorems of Ardila–Serrano and DeWitt on skew Schur functions which are Schur $P$-functions. We also prove new Pfaffian formulas for certain related involution Schubert polynomials.

A Hopf Algebraic Approach to Schur Function Identities

Using cocommutativity of the Hopf algebra of symmetric functions, certain skew Schur functions are proved to be equal. Some of these skew Schur function identities are new.

Double Posets and the Antipode of QSym

A quasisymmetric function is assigned to every double poset (that is, every finite set endowed with two partial orders) and any weight function on its ground set. This generalizes well-known objects such as monomial and fundamental quasisymmetric functions, (skew) Schur functions, dual immaculate functions, and quasisymmetric $\left(P, \omega\right)$-partition enumerators. We prove a formula for the antipode of this function that holds under certain conditions (which are satisfied when the second order of the double poset is total, but also in some other cases); this restates (in a way that to us seems more natural) a result by Malvenuto and Reutenauer, but our proof is new and self-contained. We generalize it further to an even more comprehensive setting, where a group acts on the double poset by automorphisms.