On the Holonomy or Algebraicity of Generating Functions Counting Lattice Walks in the Quarter-Plane

Abstract

In two recent works \cite{BMM,BK}, it has been shown that the counting generating functions (CGF) for the 23 walks with small steps confined in a quadrant and associated with a finite group of birational transformations are holonomic, and even algebraic in 4 cases -- in particular for the so-called Gessel's walk. It turns out that the type of functional equations satisfied by these CGF appeared in a probabilistic context almost 40 years ago. Then a method of resolution was proposed in \cite{FIM}, involving at once algebraic tools and a reduction to boundary value problems. Recently this method has been developed in a combinatorics framework in \cite{Ra}, where a thorough study of the explicit expressions for the CGF is proposed. The aim of this paper is to derive the nature of the bivariate CGF by a direct use of some general theorems given in \cite{FIM}.