An occurrence of a consecutive permutation pattern p in a permutation π is a segment of consecutive letters of π whose values appear in the same order of size as the letters in p. The set of all permutations forms a poset with respect to such pattern containment. We compute the Möbius function of intervals in this poset, providing what may be called a complete solution to the problem. For most intervals our results give an immediate answer to the question. In the remaining cases, we give a polynomial time algorithm to compute the Möbius function. In particular, we show that the Möbius function only takes the values −1, 0 and 1.

In [Ferrari, L. and Pinzani, R.: Lattices of lattice paths. J. Stat. Plan. Inference 135 (2005), 77-92] a natural order on Dyck paths of any fixed length inducing a distributive lattice structure is defined. We transfer this order to noncrossing partitions along a well-known bijection [Simion, R.: Noncrossing partitions. Discrete Math. 217 (2000), 367-409], thus showing that noncrossing partitions can be endowed with a distributive lattice structure having some combinatorial relevance. Finally we prove that our lattices are isomorphic to the posets of 312-avoiding permutations with the order induced by the strong Bruhat order of the symmetric group.

International audienceWe introduce the notion of pattern in the context of lattice paths, and investigate it in the specific case of Dyck paths. Similarly to the case of permutations, the pattern-containment relation defines a poset structure on the set of all Dyck paths, which we call the Dyck pattern poset . Given a Dyck path PP, we determine a formula for the number of Dyck paths covered by PP, as well as for the number of Dyck paths covering PP. We then address some typical pattern-avoidance issues, enumerating some classes of pattern-avoiding Dyck paths. We also compute the generating function of Dyck paths avoiding any single pattern in a recursive fashion, from which we deduce the exact enumeration of such a class of paths. Finally, we describe the asymptotic behavior of the sequence counting Dyck paths avoiding a generic pattern, we prove that the Dyck pattern poset is a well-ordering and we propose a list of open problems

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Starting from a succession rule for Catalan numbers, we define a procedure encoding and listing the objects enumerated by these numbers such that two consecutive codes of the list differ only for one digit. Gray code we obtain can be generalized to all the succession rules with the stability property: each label (k) has in its production two labels c 1 and c 2 , always in the same position, regardless of k. Because of this link, we define Gray structures the sets of those combinatorial objects whose construction can be encoded by a succession rule with the stability property. This property is a characteristic that can be found among various succession rules, as the finite, factorial or transcendental ones.We also indicate an algorithm which is a very slight modification of the Walsh's one, working in a O(1) worst-case time per word for generating Gray codes.