Séminaire Lotharingien de Combinatoire, 93B.76 (2025), 12 pp.

Sara Billey and Matjaž Konvalinka

Quilts of Alternating Sign Matrices

Abstract. In this extended abstract, we present new objects, quilts of alternating sign matrices with respect to two given posets. %% For example, the rank function on all submatrices of a matrix gives rise to a quilt with respect to two Boolean lattices. %% When the two posets are chains, a quilt is equivalent to an alternating sign matrix and its corresponding corner sum matrix. Quilts also generalize the monotone Boolean functions counted by the Dedekind numbers. They form a distributive lattice with many beautiful properties and contain many classical and well known sublattices, such as the lattice of matroids of a given rank and ground set. While enumerating quilts is hard in general, we prove two major enumerative results, when one of the posets is an antichain and when one of them is a chain. We also give some bounds for the number of quilts when one poset is the Boolean lattice.


Received: November 15, 2024. Accepted: February 15, 2025. Final version: April 1, 2025.

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