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Lecture 1: Catalan Numbers and Recurrence Relations

This document provides a summary of a lecture on Catalan numbers and recurrence relations. It discusses: 1) Catalan numbers, including their definition and generating function. 2) Two proofs of the Catalan number formula - Andre's reflection method and a bijective proof involving exceedance numbers. 3) Homogeneous solutions to linear recurrence relations with constant coefficients. The solutions take the form of powers of the characteristic roots of the recurrence equation.

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288 views6 pages

Lecture 1: Catalan Numbers and Recurrence Relations

This document provides a summary of a lecture on Catalan numbers and recurrence relations. It discusses: 1) Catalan numbers, including their definition and generating function. 2) Two proofs of the Catalan number formula - Andre's reflection method and a bijective proof involving exceedance numbers. 3) Homogeneous solutions to linear recurrence relations with constant coefficients. The solutions take the form of powers of the characteristic roots of the recurrence equation.

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Nameet Jain
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Discrete Mathematics 6-AUG-2014

Lecture 1: Catalan Numbers and Recurrence Relations


Instructor: Sushmita Ruj Scribe: Nishant Kumar and Subhadip Singha

1 Catalan Numbers[2]
1.1 Introduction
In combinatorial mathematics, the Catalan numbers form a sequence of natural numbers
that occur in various counting problems, often involving recursively-defined objects. They
are named after the Belgian mathematician Eugne Charles Catalan.
The nth Catalan number is given directly in terms of binomial coefficients by:
 
1 2n 2n!
Cn = . = ∀n ≥ 0 (1)
n+1 n (n + 1)!n!

The first Catalan numbers for n = 0, 1, 2, 3, are 1, 1, 2, 5, 14, 42, 132, 429, 1430,
4862, 16796, 58786, 208012, 742900, 2674440, 9694845, 35357670, 129644790, 477638700,
1767263190, 6564120420, 24466267020, 91482563640, 343059613650, 1289904147324,.....

1.2 Proofs for Catalan Numbers :


A large number of formal and informal proofs have been developed for Catalan Num-
bers.Some of them are quite involved. Two simple ones among them have been discussed
below :

1.2.1 First Proof by Andre’s Reflection Method


This method is based on counting the total number of monotonically increasing paths from
bottom left corner to the top right corner in an nXn square.We need to count the number
of paths possible without crossing the diagonal.Suppose we are given a monotonic path in
an n n grid that does cross the diagonal. Find the first edge in the path that lies above
the diagonal, and flip the portion of the path occurring after that edge, along a line parallel
to the diagonal. Observe that now we have taken into account k+1 vertical edges and k
horizontal edges for some k between 1 and n-1. This leaves l-1 vertical edges and l horizontal
edges, where l + k = n. By reflecting the rest of the vertical and horizontal edges, we will
have k + 1 + l = n +1 vertical edges and k + l - 1 = n - 1 horizontal edges. The resulting
path is a monotonic path in an (n − 1) (n + 1) grid. Figure 1 illustrates this procedure; the
green portion of the path is the portion being flipped.This method can be mapped to the
Dyke words problem where we start with a sequence of sequence of n X’s and n Y’s which
is not a Dyck word, and exchanging all X’s with Y’s after the first Y that violates the Dyck
condition. At that first Y, there are k + 1 Y’s and k X’s for some k between 1 and n − 1.

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Figure 1: The green portion of the path is flipped. The old grid is n x n. The new grid is
(n - 1) x (n + 1).

Since every monotonic path in the (n − 1) (n + 1) grid is of length 2n and every such
path involves n + 1 vertical edges in any order, the number of these paths is equal to:
 
2n
(2)
n+1

Therefore, to calculate the number of monotonic n n paths which do not cross the diagonal,
we need to subtract this from the total number of monotonic n n paths, so we finally obtain
   
2n 2n
− (3)
n n+1

which is the nth Catalan number Cn .

1.3 Second Proof of Catalan Numbers Rukavicka Josef[1]


In order to understand this proof, we need to understand the concept of exceedance number,
defined as follows :
Exceedance number, for any path in any square matrix, is defined as the number of vertical
edges above the diagonal.
For example, in Figure 1, the edges lying above the diagonal are marked in red, so the
exceedance of the path is 5.
This is a bijective proof, while being more involved than the previous one, provides a
more natural explanation for the term n + 1 appearing in the denominator of the formula
for Cn. A generalized version of this proof can be found in a paper of Rukavicka Josef.

1.3.1 Method to reduce the exceedance number of the path


We need to reduce the exceedance number of the path till we get path with exceedance
number zero implying that all the vertical edges are below the diagonal. For a given a

1-2
Figure 2: A path with exceedance 5..

monotonic path whose exceedance is not zero, then we may apply the following method to
construct a new path whose exceedance is one less than the one we started with.

1. Starting from the bottom left, follow the path until it first travels above the diagonal.

2. Continue to follow the path until it touches the diagonal again. Denote by X the first
such edge that is reached.

3. Swap the portion of the path occurring before X with the portion occurring after X.

Figure 3: The green and red portions are being exchanged.

The following diagrams depict an example of reduction of exceedance number following


the steps as metioned above.
Notice that the exceedance has dropped from three to two. In fact, the algorithm will
cause the exceedance to decrease by one, for any path that we feed it, because the first
vertical step starting on the diagonal (at the point marked with a black dot) is the unique
vertical edge that under the operation passes from above the diagonal to below it; all other
vertical edges stay on the same side of the diagonal.It is also not difficult to see that this
process is reversible: given any path P whose exceedance is less than n, there is exactly one
path which yields P when the algorithm is applied to it. Indeed, the (black) edge X, which
originally was the first horizontal step ending on the diagonal, has become the last horizontal

1-3
step starting on the diagonal. This implies that the number of paths of exceedance n is
equal to the number of paths of exceedance n 1, which is equal to the number of paths of
exceedance n 2, and so on, down to zero. In other words, we have split up the set of all
monotonic paths into n + 1 equally sized classes, corresponding to the possible exceedances
between 0 and n. Since there are:
 
2n
(4)
n

Thus we get the desired result as below


 
1 2n
Cn = . (5)
n+1 n

1-4
2 Linear Recurrence Solutions with constant coefficients
[3] Let us suppose an , an−1 , an−1 ..........an−k are the values of the relation at n, n-1 upto n
- k, A linear recurrence relation of degree with coefficients is a recurrence relation of the
form:

c0 an + c1 an−1 ......ck a(n−k) = fn (6)


If fn = 0 then the equation above becomes homogeneous. Total solution for a recurrence
relation = homoegeneous solution + particular.In this particular section, however , we shall
discuss about the homoegneous equation only.

A homogeneous solution of linear equation with constant coefficient is of the form Aαr
which is called the characteristic root and A is a constant which are determined by boundary
conditions, since Aαr is a root,it will satisfy the homogeneous equation.

c0 Aαn + c1 Aαn−1 ......ck Aα(n−k) = 0 (7)

=⇒
c0 Aαn + c1 Aαn−1 ......ck Aα(n−k) = 0 (8)
so, α is a characteristic root for this equation.
e .g.
an − an−1 − an−1 (9)

αn − αn−1 − αn−1 (10)


Solving,we get √ √
1+ 5 1− 5
α1 = α1 = (11)
2 2
√ √
n 1+ 5 r 1− 5 r
ar = A1 ( ) + A2 ( ) (12)
2 2

Using Boundary Conditions, a0 = 0a1 = 1, we get


1 1
A1 = (1 + √ ) (13)
2 5
and
1 1
A2 = (1 − √ ) (14)
2 5

If the roots of the solution are not all distinct,α1 = α is a root with multiplicity m. The
corresponding homogeneous equation

c0 Aαn + c1 Aαn−1 ......ck Aα(n−k) = 0 (15)

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becomes the following :

c0 (n)Aαn−1 + c1 (n − 2)Aαn−2 ......ck (n − k)Aα(n−k−1) = 0 (16)

as the derivative of the original root becomes the another solution.Now multiplying all
the terms of the equation by α :

c0 (n)Aαn + c1 (n − 2)Aαn−1 ......ck (n − k)Aα(n−k) = 0 (17)

Now, A(n−1) n α(n−1) is a solution for this homogeneous equation. Similarly we will
have solutions for other derivatives, as follows :
A(n−2) n2 αn A(n−3) n3 αn

References
[1] Rukavika Joseph. On generalized Dyck paths. http://www.emis.de/journals/EJC/
Volume_18/PDF/v18i1p40.pdf, [Online, accessed 28 August, 2014].

[2] Wikipedia. Catalan Numbers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_number,


[Online, accessed 28 August, 2014].

[3] Wikipedia. Recurrence relation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrence_


relation, [Online, accessed 28 August, 2014].

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