Pascal's formulas and vector fields (Q7007758)

In this article, the authors study four well-known combinatorial triangular arrays, namely the binomial coefficients, the Stirling numbers of the first and second kind, and the Eulerian numbers. From the standard recurrences for these triangles, they construct natural Markov chains and show that they are related to the simple symmetric one-dimensional random walk, the Chinese restaurant process, the coupon collector problem and the one-dimensional internal diffusion limited aggregation (iDLA), respectively. They study the sample paths of these processes and show their convergence to certain ODEs in the first three cases. Finally, they relate these results to enumeration and sampling of certain classes of automata.