Stirling complexes
In this paper the author introduces the so called \textit{Stirling complexes}, which can be viewed as ``natural reconfiguration spaces associated to the problem of distributing a fixed number of resources to labeled nodes of a tree network, so that no node is left empty.'' He proves that such spaces are ``cubical complexes, which can be thought of as higher-dimensional geometric extensions of the combinatorial Stirling problem of partitioning a set of named objects into non-empty labeled parts'' (hence their name). The main result, namely Theorem 2.1, is that ``Stirling complexes are always homotopy equivalent to wedges of spheres of the same dimension.'' Furthermore, the author provides several ``combinatorial formulae to count these spheres.'' Moreover, he obtains the following (somewhat surprising) result that ``the homotopy type of the Stirling complexes depends only on the number of resources and the number of the labeled nodes, not on the actual structure of the tree network.''
scientific article; zbMATH DE number 7700998
scientific article