Discrete Mathematics & Theoretical Computer Science |
A poset is said to be (2+2)-free if it does not contain an induced subposet that is isomorphic to 2+2, the union of two disjoint 2-element chains. In a recent paper, Bousquet-Mélou et al. found, using so called ascent sequences, the generating function for the number of (2+2)-free posets: $P(t)=∑_n≥ 0 ∏_i=1^n ( 1-(1-t)^i)$. We extend this result by finding the generating function for (2+2)-free posets when four statistics are taken into account, one of which is the number of minimal elements in a poset. We also show that in a special case when only minimal elements are of interest, our rather involved generating function can be rewritten in the form $P(t,z)=∑_n,k ≥0 p_n,k t^n z^k = 1+ ∑_n ≥0\frac{zt}{(1-zt)^n+1}∏_i=1^n (1-(1-t)^i)$ where $p_n,k$ equals the number of (2+2)-free posets of size $n$ with $k$ minimal elements.