Enumeration of totally positive Grassmann cells
Abstract
Description
Alex Postnikov has given a combinatorially explicit cell decomposition of the totally nonnegative part of a Grassmannian, denoted Gr_{kn}+, and showed that this set of cells is isomorphic as a graded poset to many other interesting graded posets. The main result of this paper is an explicit generating function which enumerates the cells in Gr_{kn}+ according to their dimension. As a corollary, we give a new proof that the Euler characteristic of Gr_{kn}+ is 1. Additionally, we use our result to produce a new q-analog of the Eulerian numbers, which interpolates between the Eulerian numbers, the Narayana numbers, and the binomial coefficients.
21 pages, 10 figures. Final version, with references added and minor corrections made, to appear in Advances in Mathematics
21 pages, 10 figures. Final version, with references added and minor corrections made, to appear in Advances in Mathematics