Counting Strings with Given Elementary Symmetric Function Evaluations II Circular Strings,.pdfVIP

COUNTING STRINGS WITH GIVEN ELEMENTARY SYMMETRIC FUNCTION EVALUATIONS I: STRINGS OVER WITH PRIME C.R. MIERS AND F. RUSKEY Abstract. Let be a string over with prime. The -th elementary symmetric function evaluated at is denoted (). We study the cardinalities (; ) of the set of length strings for which () = . The profile 1 2 0 1 1 of a string is the sequence of frequencies with which each letter occurs. The profile of determines (), and hence . Let 1 1 : be the map that takes 0 1 1 mod to (1 2 1) mod . We show that is well- defined and injective and how to efficiently determine its range. These results are used to efficiently compute (; ). 1 2 Key words. elementary symmetric function, combinatorial enumeration, integers mod a prime. AMS subject classifications. 05A15, 05E05, 05A19 1. Introduction. The theory of symmetric functions has long been a basic tool of combinatorial enu- meration. Indeed, Cameron [1] states that “one can appreciate the view held by some people, that if it isn’t related to symmetric polynomials, then it isn’t combinatorics!”. However the enumeration of the number of variable assignments to symmetric functions so that the functions achieve given values seems to be new and interesting. In order for the problem to make sense, we must choose the variables to come from some finite algebraic structure, and pick a particular class of symmetric functions. Here we choose the variables to come from the ring of integers mod a prime , and the cl