Descending plane partitions and rhombus tilings of a hexagon with a triangular hole (Q852705)

A descending plane partition is an array \(\pi=(\pi_{i,j})_{i=1,j=i}^{k,\lambda_k}\) such that (1) \(\lambda_1\geq\lambda_2\geq\cdots \geq\lambda_k\geq k\), (2) the entries along rows are weakly decreasing, (3) the entries along columns are strictly decreasing, and (4) the first entry in each row does not exceed the number of entries in the preceding row but is greater than the number of entries in its own row. The author obtains an elegant visualization of the lattice structure for descending plane partitions showing that such partitions can be geometrically realized as cyclically symmetric rhombus tilings of a certain hexagon from which a centrally located equilateral triangle of side length \(2\) has been removed.