On hooks of skew Young diagrams and bars in shifted diagrams (Q5939207)

In [Ann. Comb. 2, No. 2, 103-110 (1998; Zbl 0929.05091)] the author generalized to arbitrary hooks the well-known fact that any Young diagram has always one more addable than removable box. She gave a correspondence between the multisets of hooks of certain Young diagrams showing that for any partition \(\lambda\) and for each type of hooks (i.e. for fixed lengths of the arm and the leg) there is exactly one more addable than removable hook. This result was applied to deduce direct proofs for the conjecture in [\textit{A. Regev} and \textit{A. Vershik}, Electron. J. Comb. 4, No. 1, Research paper R22 (1997; Zbl 0885.05109); printed version J. Comb. 4, No. 1, 249-260 (1997)]. In the paper under review the author develops further her results. As an illustration of the effectiveness of her methods she gives short combinatorial proofs of some refined identities on multisets of hooks in the case of shift-symmetric partitions obtained originally by multistep induction in [\textit{A. Regev}, Eur. J. Comb. 21, No. 7, 949-957 and 959-966 (2000; Zbl 0965.05096 and Zbl 0962.05062)].