Stirling complexes

Abstract

In this paper we study natural reconfiguration spaces associated to the problem of distributing a fixed number of resources to labeled nodes of a tree network, so that no node is left empty. These spaces turn out to be cubical complexes, which can be thought of as higher-dimensional geometric extensions of the combinatorial Stirling problem of partitioning a set of named objects into non-empty labeled parts. As our main result, we prove that these Stirling complexes are always homotopy equivalent to wedges of spheres of the same dimension. Furthermore, we provide several combinatorial formulae to count these spheres. Somewhat surprisingly, the homotopy type of the Stirling complexes turns out to depend only on the number of resources and the number of the labeled nodes, not on the actual structure of the tree network.