Schröder–Hipparchus number

In number theory, the Schröder–Hipparchus numbers form an integer sequence that can be used to count the number of plane trees with a given set of leaves, the number of ways of inserting parentheses into a sequence, and the number of ways of dissecting a convex polygon into smaller polygons by inserting diagonals. These numbers begin

They are also called the super-Catalan numbers, the little Schröder numbers, or the Hipparchus numbers, after Eugène Charles Catalan and his Catalan numbers, Ernst Schröder and the closely related Schröder numbers, and the ancient Greek mathematician Hipparchus who appears from evidence in Plutarch to have known of these numbers.

The Schröder–Hipparchus numbers may be used to count several closely related combinatorial objects:

As the figure shows, there is a simple combinatorial equivalence between these objects: a polygon subdivision has a plane tree as a form of its dual graph, the leaves of the tree correspond to the symbols in a parenthesized sequence, and the internal nodes of the tree other than the root correspond to parenthesized groups. The parenthesized sequence itself may be written around the perimeter of the polygon with its symbols on the sides of the polygon and with parentheses at the endpoints of the selected diagonals. This equivalence provides a bijective proof that all of these kinds of objects are counted by a single integer sequence.

The same numbers also count the number of double permutations (sequences of the numbers from 1 to n, each number appearing twice, with the first occurrences of each number in sorted order) that avoid the permutation patterns 12312 and 121323.

The closely related large Schröder numbers are equal to twice the Schröder–Hipparchus numbers, and may also be used to count several types of combinatorial objects including certain kinds of lattice paths, partitions of a rectangle into smaller rectangles by recursive slicing, and parenthesizations in which a pair of parentheses surrounding the whole sequence of elements is also allowed. The Catalan numbers also count closely related sets of objects including subdivisions of a polygon into triangles, plane trees in which all internal nodes have exactly two children, and parenthesizations in which each pair of parentheses surrounds exactly two symbols or parenthesized groups.

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