Alternating sign matrices and tournaments (Q5956769): Difference between revisions

An alternating sign matrix is a square matrix of entries from \(\{-1,0,1\}\) with the property that in any row or column the entries sum to 1 and the non-zero entries alternate in sign. A tournament is an orientation of the complete graph. An upset in a tournament is an edge directed from a higher numbered vertex to a lower numbered vertex. This paper answers a challenge laid down by Bressoud in the same volume; see \textit{D. M. Bressoud} [Adv. Appl. Math. 27, No. 2-3, 289-297 (2001; Zbl 0990.05001)]. Namely, it gives a bijective proof of a particular identity relating the alternating sign matrices of order \(n\) to the upsets in tournaments on \(n\) vertices. The proof makes clever use of orientations of complete monotone triangles. These are triangular arrays in which (i) the \(k\) entries in the \(k\)th row are strictly increasing, (ii) the final row is \(1,2,3,\dots,n\) and (iii) entries in other rows lie weakly between their two neighbours in the row below.