The asymptotics of monotone subsequences of involutions (Q1847858)

Consider the permutations of \(1,2,\dots, m+2n\) with \(m\) cycles of length one (i.e. fixpoints) and \(n\) cycles of length two. Take such a permutation at random (uniform distribution). Limiting distributions of the lengths of the longest increasing subsequences are investigated. Depending on how \(m\) and \(n\) tend to infinity, different limits occur: Tracy-Widom distributions for the largest eigenvalues of certain random matrices, the normal distribution and distributions interpolating between pairs of Tracy-Widom. The very intricate derivations are based on algebraic work of the authors connecting statistics of random evolutions with certain orthogonal polynomials and asymptotic analysis of these.