A study of unimodality of some combinatorial sequences and polynomials

Abstract

In this article, we present a short, non-exhaustive study of an important and well-known property of combinatorial sequences - unimodality. We shall have a look at a sample of classical results on unimodality and related properties, and then proceed to understand the unimodality of the Gaussian polynomial in more detail. We will look at an outline of O'Hara's proof of the unimodality of the Gaussian polynomial. In order to grasp the challenge of the problem of obtaining an injective proof of the unimodality of the Gaussian polynomial (which is still an open question), we make several attempts and understand where these attempts fail.