Séminaire Lotharingien de Combinatoire, B37c (1996), 12
pp.
Volker Strehl
Minimal Transitive Products of Transpositions:
The Reconstruction of a Proof of A. Hurwitz
Abstract.
We want to draw the combintorialists attention to an
important, but apparently little known paper by
the function theorist A. Hurwitz, published in 1891,
where he announces the solution of a counting problem which has
gained some attention recently: in how many ways can a given
permutation be written as the product of transpositions
such that the transpositions generate the full
symmetric group, and such that the number of factors is as
small as possible (under this side condition).
Received: June 15, 1997; Accepted: August 8,
1997.
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