Mahonian Pairs
  We introduce the notion of a Mahonian pair. Consider the set, P^*, of all words having the positive integers as alphabet. Given finite subsets S,T of P^*, we say that (S,T) is a Mahonian pair if the distribution of the major index, maj, over S is the same as the distribution of the inversion number, inv, over T. So the well-known fact that maj and inv are equidistributed over the symmetric group, S_n, can be expressed by saying that (S_n,S_n) is a Mahonian pair. We investigate various Mahonian pairs (S,T) with S different from T. Our principal tool is Foata's fundamental bijection f: P^* -> P^* since it has the property that maj w = inv f(w) for any word w. We consider various families of words associated with Catalan and Fibonacci numbers. We show that, when restricted to words in {1,2}^*, f transforms familiar statistics on words into natural statistics on integer partitions such as the size of the Durfee square. The Rogers-Ramanujan identities, the Catalan triangle, and various q-analogues also make an appearance. We generalize the definition of Mahonian pairs to infinite sets and use this as a tool to connect a partition bijection of Corteel-Savage-Venkatraman with the Greene-Kleitman decomposition of a Boolean algebra into symmetric chains. We close with comments about future work and open problems. 
Bruce E. Sagan (Department of Mathematics, Michigan State University,   East Lansing, MI, USA) and Carla D. Savage (Departme...
math.CO