Long Cycle Factorizations: Bijective Computation in the General Case

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the computation of the number of ordered factorizations of a long cycle in the symmetric group where the number of factors is arbitrary and the cycle structure of the factors is given. Jackson (1988) derived the first closed form expression for the generating series of these numbers using the theory of the irreducible characters of the symmetric group. Thanks to a direct bijection we compute a similar formula and provide the first purely combinatorial evaluation of these generating series.

Keywords

• jackson's formula
• factorizations
• symmetric group
• connection coefficients
• [info.info-dm] computer science [cs]/discrete mathematics [cs.dm]