New Euler-Mahonian statistics on permutations and words (Q678606)

Given a word on a totally ordered alphabet, its rearrangement class consists in all the words which can be obtained by permutation of its letters. A function defined on the rearrangement classes of words is called a ``statistic'', for example the number of descents, or ``des'', of a word \(a_1\dots a_n\) is the number of \(i\) such that \(a_i> a_{i+1}\), its major index, or ``maj'', is the sum of such \(i\)'s, while the number of inversions, or ``inv'', is the number of pairs \((i,j)\) such that \(i<j\) and \(a_i>a_j\). Distribution properties of statistics have been studied in depth, see e.g. \textit{D. Foata}, Rearrangement of words, in ``Combinatorics on words'', Encyclopedia of Mathematics and its Applications, Vol. 17, Cambridge University Press, 1983. A statistic which is equidistributed with des is called Eulerian (since the generating polynomials for des have been first studied by Euler), while a statistic equidistributed with inv (or maj) is called Mahonian. The purpose of this paper is to introduce several new Mahonian statistics, and to investigate the equidistribution properties between bistatistics which can be formed with these new statistics and already existing ones. For example, one of the new statistics, called MAD, is such that the bistatistic (des, MAD) is equidistributed with (exc, inv), exc being the number of excedances. Such equidistribution properties are usually given bijective proofs, and it is the case in this paper, where the bijections which are used are generalizations to arbitrary words of bijections already defined in the literature, for words whose letters are all distinct (in this case the word can be identified with a permutation of its letters). Some continued fraction expansions are also investigated, which are obtained through the construction of bijections with marked Motzkin paths, in the spirit of \textit{P. Flajolet}'s paper [``Combinatorial aspects of continued fractions'', Discrete Math. 32, No. 2, 125-161 (1980; Zbl 0445.05014) and Ann. Discrete Math. 9, 217-222 (1980; Zbl 0445.05015)].