ReceivedMarch29,.pdf

175 ? 0097-3165/02 $35.00? 2002 Elsevier Science (USA)All rights reserved. Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A 98, 175–191 (2002) doi:10.1006/jcta.2001.3238, available online at on Forest Volume Decompositions and Abel–Cayley–Hurwitz Multinomial Expansions1 1 Supported in part by NSF Grants DMS 97-03961 and DMS-0071448. Jim Pitman Department of Statistics, University of California, 367 Evans Hall #3860, Berkeley, California 94720-3860 Received March 29, 2001 This paper presents a systematic approach to the discovery, interpretation and verification of various extensions of Hurwitz’s multinomial identities, involving polynomials defined by sums over all subsets of a finite set. The identities are interpreted as decompositions of forest volumes defined by the enumerator poly- nomials of sets of rooted labeled forests. These decompositions involve the follow- ing basic forest volume formula, which is a refinement of Cayley’s multinomial expansion: for R ? S the polynomial enumerating out-degrees of vertices of rooted forests labeled by S whose set of roots is R, with edges directed away from the roots, is 1 C r ￥ R xr 21 C s ￥ S xs 2 |S|? |R|?1. ? 2002 Elsevier Science (USA) 1. INTRODUCTION Hurwitz [21] discovered a number of remarkable identities of polyno- mials in a finite number of variables xs, s ￥ S, involving sums of products over all 2 |W| subsets A of some fixed set W … S, with each product formed from the subset sums xA :=C s ￥ A xs and xA?=xW ?xA, where A? :=W?A. (1) For instance, for S?W={0, 1}, with x substituted for x0 and y for x1 to ease the notation, there are the following: Hurwitz identities [21, II’, III, IV]. C A ? W x(x+xA) |A|?1 (y+xA?) |A?|=(x+y+xW) |W| (2) C A ? |W| x(x+xA) |A|?1 y(y+xA?) |A?|?1=(x+y)(x+y+xW) |W|?1 (3) C A ? |W| (x+xA) |A| (y+xA?) |A?|= C B ? |W| (x+y+xW) |B?| |B|! D b ￥ B xb (4) For |W|=n and xs — 1, by summing first over A with |A|=k, these Hurwitz sums reduce to corresponding Abel sums [1, 48] Ac, dn (x, y) :=C n k=0