An involution on restricted Laguerre histories and its applications

Abstract

Laguerre histories (restricted or not) are certain weighted Motzkin paths with two types of level steps. They are, on one hand, in natural bijection with the set of permutations, and on the other hand, yield combinatorial interpretations for the moments of Laguerre polynomials via Flajolet's combinatorial theory of continued fractions. In this paper, we first introduce a reflection-like involution on restricted Laguerre histories. Then, we demonstrate its power by composing this involution with three bijections due to Fran\ccon-Viennot, Foata-Zeilberger, and Yan-Zhou-Lin, respectively. A host of equidistribution results involving various (multiset-valued) permutation statistics follow from these applications. As byproducts, seven apparently new Mahonian statistics present themselves; new interpretations of known Mahonian statistics are discovered as well. Finally, in our effort to show the interconnections between these Mahonian statistics, we are naturally led to a new link between the variant Yan-Zhou-Lin bijection and the Kreweras complement.