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Article
Maximal Supports and Schur-positivity Among Connected Skew Shapes
Faculty Journal Articles
  • Peter McNamara, Bucknell University
  • Stephanie van Willigenburg, University of British Columbia
Publication Date
8-1-2012
Description

The Schur-positivity order on skew shapes is defined by BA if the difference sAsB is Schur-positive. It is an open problem to determine those connected skew shapes that are maximal with respect to this ordering. A strong necessary condition for the Schur-positivity of sAsB is that the support of B is contained in that of A, where the support of B is defined to be the set of partitions λ for which sλ appears in the Schur expansion of sB. We show that to determine the maximal connected skew shapes in the Schur-positivity order and this support containment order, it suffices to consider a special class of ribbon shapes. We explicitly determine the support for these ribbon shapes, thereby determining the maximal connected skew shapes in the support containment order.

Journal
European Journal of Combinatorics
Department
Mathematics
Citation Information
Peter McNamara and Stephanie van Willigenburg. "Maximal Supports and Schur-positivity Among Connected Skew Shapes" Vol. 33 Iss. 6 (2012) p. 1190 - 1206
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/peter_mcnamara/9/