Random Young Tableaux and Combinatorial Identities

Abstract

We derive new combinatorial identities which may be viewed as multivariate analogs of summation formulas for hypergeometric series. As in the previous paper [Re], we start with probability distributions on the space of the infinite Young tableaux. Then we calculate the probability that the entry of a random tableau at a given box equals n=1,2,.... Summing these probabilities over n and equating the result to 1 we get a nontrivial identity. Our choice for the initial distributions is motivated by the recent work on harmonic analysis on the infinite symmetric group and related topics.