A Bijection on Classes Enumerated by the Schr\"oder Numbers

Abstract

We consider a sorting machine consisting of two stacks in series where the first stack has the added restriction that entries in the stack must be in decreasing order from top to bottom. The class of permutations sortable by this machine are known to be enumerated by the Schr\"oder numbers. In this paper, we give a bijection between these sortable permutations of length $n$ and Schr\"oder paths -- the lattice paths from $(0,0)$ to $(n-1,n-1)$ composed of East steps $(1,0)$, North steps $(0,1)$, and Diagonal steps $(1,1)$ that travel weakly below the line $y=x$.