On standard Young tableaux of bounded height (Q2417465)

This beautiful survey article is an excellent first exposure to the rich combinatorial interactions among standard Young tableaux, lattice walks, and several other objects. The central focus of the paper is the enumeration of standard Young tableaux with a bounded number of rows, where the enumeration often takes into account additional parameters such as the number of columns of odd length. The introduction discusses the exponential generating functions \(Y_k(t)=\sum_{n\geq 0}y_k(n)\frac{t^n}{n!}\), where \(y_k(n)\) is the number of standard Young tableaux on \(n\) boxes with height at most \(k\). The determinantal expressions for these generating functions, which are due to \textit{B. Gordon} [Proc. Symp. Pure Math. 19, 91--100 (1971; Zbl 0266.05005)] and \textit{I. M. Gessel} [J. Comb. Theory, Ser. A 53, No. 2, 257--285 (1990; Zbl 0704.05001)] and involve hyperbolic Bessel functions of the first kind, show the reader that the enumerative analysis of these objects is a high-brow undertaking. Section 2 presents a smorgasbord of bijections relating standard Young tableaux to lattice walks in Weyl chambers, arc diagrams, involutions, and walks in Young's lattice. Section 3 describes some generating function expressions. It also briefly mentions the orbit sum method of \textit{M. Bousquet-Mélou} and \textit{M. Mishna} [Contemp. Math. 520, 1--39 (2010; Zbl 1209.05008)], a recently-developed tool that seems worthy of further exploitation. This section also highlights the interesting interaction between the exact, bijective enumerations from the previous section, the differential equations satisfied by the corresponding generating functions, and the asymptotic behavior of the coefficients of these generating functions. Section 4 is brief; it mentions formulas for the number of permutations of length \(n\) that do not contain an increasing subsequence of length \(k+1\). Finally, Section 5 points to interesting ideas for further exploration. The entire article is full of open problems, along with commentary from the author about which problems seem particularly approachable. Thus, while the presentation is smooth and pleasant, it also gives the ambitious reader a sense of excitement for the future. For the entire collection see [Zbl 1410.05001].