On the sign-imbalance of partition shapes (Q2566801)

The sign of a standard Young tableau is defined as the sign of the permutation you get by reading it row by row from left to right, like a book. A well-known conjecture of R. Stanley says that the sum of the signs of all SYTs with \(n\) squares is 2\(^{[n/2]}\). The main goal of the present paper is to establish a stronger result with a purely combinatorial proof. This one uses the Robinson-Schensted correspondence and a new concept, called chess tableaux. Another important result proved in the paper is related to a conjecture of R. Stanley concerning weighted sums of squares of sign-imbalances. The method used in this proof is built on a relation between the sign of a permutation and the sign of its RC-corresponding tableaux. The author finishes his paper by indicating some possible generalizations of the concept of sign-imbalance to finite posets. He also indicates some interesting research directions with respect to this subject.