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Plactic Monoid

The plactic monoid is a mathematical structure defined over a totally ordered alphabet where elements are words modulo Knuth equivalence. Knuth equivalence allows words to be transformed by conditional commutation relations, modeling the sliding of symbols. Elements of the plactic monoid correspond uniquely to semistandard Young tableaux. Properties like longest increasing subsequences are preserved by Knuth equivalence, and the plactic monoid forms the basis of the tableau ring.

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42 views

Plactic Monoid

The plactic monoid is a mathematical structure defined over a totally ordered alphabet where elements are words modulo Knuth equivalence. Knuth equivalence allows words to be transformed by conditional commutation relations, modeling the sliding of symbols. Elements of the plactic monoid correspond uniquely to semistandard Young tableaux. Properties like longest increasing subsequences are preserved by Knuth equivalence, and the plactic monoid forms the basis of the tableau ring.

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rjohn 7
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Plactic monoid

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In mathematics, the plactic monoid is the monoid of all words in the alphabet of


positive integers modulo Knuth equivalence. Its elements can be identified with
semistandard Young tableaux. It was discovered by Donald Knuth (1970) (who called it
the tableau algebra), using an operation given by Craige Schensted (1961) in his study
of the longest increasing subsequence of a permutation.
It was named the "monoïde plaxique" by Lascoux & Schützenberger (1981), who
allowed any totally ordered alphabet in the definition. The etymology of the word
"plaxique" is unclear; it may refer to plate tectonics ("tectonique des plaques" in
French), as elementary relations that generate the equivalence allow conditional
commutation of generator symbols: they can sometimes slide across each other (in
apparent analogy to tectonic plates), but not freely.

Contents

 1Definition
 2Knuth equivalence
 3Tableau ring
 4Growth
 5See also
 6References
 7Further reading

Definition[edit]
The plactic monoid over some totally ordered alphabet (often the positive integers) is
the monoid with the following presentation:

 The generators are the letters of the alphabet


 The relations are the elementary Knuth
transformations yzx = yxz whenever x < y ≤ z and xzy = zxy whenever x ≤ y < z.

Knuth equivalence[edit]
Two words are called Knuth equivalent if they represent the same element of the
plactic monoid, or in other words if one can be obtained from the other by a sequence of
elementary Knuth transformations.
Several properties are preserved by Knuth equivalence.

 If a word is a reverse lattice word, then so is any word Knuth equivalent to it.
 If two words are Knuth equivalent, then so are the words obtained by removing their
rightmost maximal elements, as are the words obtained by removing their leftmost minimal
elements.
 Knuth equivalence preserves the length of the longest nondecreasing subsequence, and
more generally preserves the maximum of the sum of the lengths of k disjoint non-
decreasing subsequences for any fixed k.
Every word is Knuth equivalent to the word of a unique semistandard Young
tableau (this means that each row is non-decreasing and each column is strictly
increasing). So the elements of the plactic monoid can be identified with the
semistandard Young tableaux, which therefore also form a monoid.

Tableau ring[edit]
The tableau ring is the monoid ring of the plactic monoid, so it has a Z-basis consisting
of elements of the plactic monoid, with the same product as in the plactic monoid.
There is a homomorphism from the plactic ring on an alphabet to the ring of polynomials
(with variables indexed by the alphabet) taking any tableau to the product of the
variables of its entries.

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