Schützenberger's jeu de taquin and plane partitions (Q5961540)

Schützenberger's ``jeu de taquin'' moves around the parts of a column-strict skew plane partition so as to fill all the holes in the partition. In the present paper the construction is modified so that the assumption of column-strictness is not needed: one is subtracted from each part which moves upwards. Knuth's generalization DELETE on the Robinson-Schensted correspondence is also modified and it is shown that the ``jeu de taquin'', DELETE, their modifications, and the Hillman-Grassl mapping are essentially equivalent. The material is also related to methods and results of Bender and Stanley; other results in the paper include a proof of MacMahon's ``box'' theorem and a generating function for plane partitions with parts of size less than or equal to \(m\) where the parts below row \(r\) form a column-strict plane partition with at most \(c\) columns.