Chords, trees and permutations (Q686151)

The present authors considered chord configurations on the circle and their relation with involutions, binary trees, and the decomposition of a cyclic permutation, represented as a product of transpositions. That latter case leads the authors to a new recurrence formula for the Catalan numbers. Reviewer's remark: The reviewer proved in his first paper [Publ. Math. Inst. Hung. Acad. Sci. 4, 63-70 (1959; Zbl 0092.011)] that the number of labelled trees with \(n\) vertices \((n^{n-2})\) is equal to the number of different representations of a cycle of length \(n\) as a product of \(n-1\) transpositions. The reviewer could not obtain a one to one correspondence between a given tree and a product of transpositions. He posed the problem to find such a one to one correspondence in his paper mentioned above. \textit{P. Moszkowski} solved the reviewer's problem, see [Eur. J. Comb. 10, No. 1, 13-16 (1989; Zbl 0672.05022)]. The authors of the present paper refer to Moszkowski's paper (see reference [16] in the present paper) as one to be published. Actually it had been published, when the present authors submitted their paper in 1990.