The nonassociativity of the double minus operation

MaRDI QIDQ4637109zbMATH OpenFDO

Authors Jia Huang, Madison Mickey, Jianbai Xu

Publication date 18 April 2018

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05651, https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/journals/JIS/VOL20/Huang/huang3.html

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zbMATH Keywords

binary sequencebinary treeleaf depthnonassociativityparenthesization

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Exact enumeration problems, generating functions (05A15) Trees (05C05) Other combinatorial number theory (11B75) Special sequences and polynomials (11B83)

Abstract: The sequence A000975 in OEIS can be defined by $A_1=1$, $A_{n+1}=2A_n$ if $n$ is odd, and $A_{n+1}=2A_n+1$ if $n$ is even. This sequence satisfies other recurrence relations, admits some closed formulas, and is known to enumerate several interesting families of objects. We provide a new interpretation of this sequence using a binary operation defined by $aominusb:=-a-b$. We show that the number of distinct results obtained by inserting parentheses in the expression $x_{0}ominus{x}_{1}ominuscdotsominus{x}_n$ equals $A_n$, by investigating the leaf depth in binary trees. Our result can be viewed as a quantitative measurement for the nonassociativity of the binary operation $ominus$.

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Cites work

• An exploration of sequence A000975
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1268810 (Why is no real title available?)
• Modular Catalan numbers
• The Lichtenberg sequence
• The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences
• The Tower of Hanoi -- myths and maths. With a foreword by Ian Stewart

Cited in

(6)

• Norton algebras of the Hamming graphs via linear characters
• Nonassociativity of the Norton algebras of some distance regular graphs
• The associative-commutative spectrum of a binary operation
• Enumeration of rooted binary perfect phylogenies
• The associative-commutative spectrum of a binary operation
• Associative-commutative spectra for some varieties of groupoids

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• OEIS

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