Enumerating permutations sortable by $k$ passes through a pop-stack

Abstract

In an exercise in the first volume of his famous series of books, Knuth considered sorting permutations by passing them through a stack. Many variations of this exercise have since been considered, including allowing multiple passes through the stack and using different data structures. We are concerned with a variation using pop-stacks that was introduced by Avis and Newborn in 1981. Let $P_k(x)$ be the generating function for the permutations sortable by $k$ passes through a pop-stack. The generating function $P_2(x)$ was recently given by Pudwell and Smith (the case $k=1$ being trivial). We show that $P_k(x)$ is rational for any $k$. Moreover, we give an algorithm to derive $P_k(x)$, and using it we determine the generating functions $P_k(x)$ for $k\leq 6$.