The c--2d-index of oriented matroids (Q1369733)

That noncommutative polynomials have practical uses in theoretical applications such as combinatorics and graph theory has been clear for some time. Further supporting evidence is forthcoming on a regular basis in ever increasing volume. It is thus not merely of combinatorial interest to deal with the material of the current paper under review. The class of Eulerian posets is known to be combinatorially well behaved in a variety of ways and thus e.g. the face lattices of convex polytopes share these niceties as well. In particular, the lattice of regions of an oriented matroid is also an Eulerian poset and therefore also suspect of being suitably well behaved. Various indices are polynomials in noncommuting variables which code important information. In particular the ab-index and the cd-index are such polynomials, where c\(=\)a\(+\)b and d\(=\)a\(\cdot\)b\(+\)b\(\cdot\)a is the basic Jordan multiplication. If P is Eulerian, then the rewriting of one index into another is possible and when the ``law of rewriting'' is explicit enough, this usually provides important combinatorial clues. When the rewriting involves c and 2d, then the resulting polynomial is the c\(-\)2d-index. It is shown that in the case under consideration in this paper the c\(-\)2d-index exists by producing a format which permits its actual computation in terms of the ab-index. The underlying mechanism relies on the manipulation of certain elementary functionals introduced by the authors whose properties when explored produce the desired result for non-constant monomials (lemmas 5-7) and thus in full generality by use of co-algebra techniques, some introduced by the authors elsewhere. Having done all this, they are able to produce counting results new and otherwise to illustrate the strength and elegance of their techniques and results obtained as a consequence.