Plethysm, categories and combinatorics (Q1096633)

The authors develop a notion called the partitional which provides a natural combinatorial interpretation of the plethystic composition of two formal power series, carried out within the framework of elementary set theory, without appeal to group-theoretic ideas or even the notion of permutation. The category of partitions of finite sets, whose objects are pairs (E,\(\pi)\), where E is a finite set and \(\pi\) is a partition on E and morphisms are the bijections between finite sets keeping the blocks of the partitions, is studied. A partitional is a functor from this category to the category of sets and it can be given by a partitional generating function. The authors establish formulas for counting the number of automorphisms of a partition, for the generating function of the plethystic product of two partitionals and other results that we cannot quote, but we consider very interesting for their simplicity.