Generalized permutation patterns -- a short survey

Abstract

An occurrence of a classical pattern p in a permutation \pi is a subsequence of \pi whose letters are in the same relative order (of size) as those in p. In an occurrence of a generalized pattern, some letters of that subsequence may be required to be adjacent in the permutation. Subsets of permutations characterized by the avoidance--or the prescribed number of occurrences--of generalized patterns exhibit connections to an enormous variety of other combinatorial structures, some of them apparently deep. We give a short overview of the state of the art for generalized patterns.