Distribution of descents in matchings

Abstract

The distribution of descents in a fixed conjugacy class of $S_n$ is studied, and it is shown that its moments have an interesting property. A particular conjugacy class that is of interest is the class of matchings (also known as fixed point free involutions). This paper provides a bijective proof of the symmetry of the descents and major indices of matchings and uses a generating function approach to prove an asymptotic normality theorem for the number of descents in matchings.