CHAPTER 2

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

2.1 Permutation

One of the earliest recorded studies of permutations occurs in the Sefer Yetsirah,

or Book of Creation, written by an unknown Jewish author sometime before the eighth

century. The author was interested in counting the various ways in which the letters of the

Hebrew alphabet can be arranged. Interestingly enough, the idea of counting the

arrangements of the letters of the alphabet also occurred in Islamic mathematics in the

eighth and ninth centuries. By the thirteenth century, the abstract idea of a permutation

had taken root so that both Abu-l-Abbas ibn al-Banna (1256-1321), a mathematician from

Marrakech in what is now Morocco, and Levi ben Gerson, a French rabbi, philosopher,

and mathematician, were able to give rigorous proofs that the number of permutations of

any set of n elements is n! as well as prove various results about counting combinations.

Levi and his predecessors, however, were concerned with permutations as simply

arrangements of a given finite set. It was the search for solutions of polynomial equations

that led Lagrange and others in the late eighteenth century to think of permutations as

functions from a finite set to itself, the set being that of the roots of a given equation. And

it was Augustin-Louis Cauchy (1789-1857) who developed in detail the basic theorems

of permutation theory and who introduced the standard notation.

2.2 Inversions

Let a1, a2, , an be a permutation of the set {1, 2, , n}. If i < j and ai > aj the pair

(ai, aj) is called an inversion of the permutation.

Let In(k) represent the number of permutations of length n with k inversions.

Theorem 2.2.2 (Muir, 1898)

The numbers In(k) have as generating function

(
2)
1
() =
1
=0 =1

2.3 Symmetric Group

Let n be a positive integer and A be the finite set {1, 2, , n}. The group of all

permutations of A is the symmetric group on n elements and it is denoted by Sn.

Theorem 2.3.1 ISnI = n! where n! = n(n-1)(n-2)(3)(2)(1)

The subgroup of Sn, consisting of the even permutations of n elements is the

alternating group An on n elements.

Theorem 2.3.2 IAnI = (n!)/2 where n! = n(n-1)(n-2)(3)(2)(1)

Consider the regular n-gon, with n 3. Label successive vertices of the n-gon by

1, 2, , n. The dihedral group Dn of isometries of the plane which map a regular n-gon

onto itself can be considered as a subgroup of Sn.

Theorem 2.3.3 IDnI = 2n