The KP hierarchy, branched covers, and triangulations (Q947772)

The authors give a new proof of a content product solution of the KP hierarchy, a result previously given by Orlov and Shcherbin; this appears as Theorem 2.3. By specializing this content product solution, the main result of the paper is obtained (Theorem 3.1): a general set of transitive ordered factorizations in the symmetric group is considered, and it is shown that a particular generating function for the numbers of such factorizations satisfies the KP hierarchy. Two corollaries of Theorem 3.1 are that a particular generating series for double Hurwitz numbers satisfies the KP hierarchy, and that a particular generating series for m-hypermap numbers is a solution to the KP hierarchy. Specialization of this last leads to further results for particular generating series for the rooted hypermap and rooted map numbers.