KTH/SU Mathematics Colloquium
May 3, 2006
Jean-Louis Loday (CNRS, Strasbourg)
The associahedron and parking functions
ABSTRACT
The associahedron is a polytope which plays an important role in
many subjects: algebraic topology, operad theory, combinatorial algebra.
We first present an elegant way of constructing it and compare this
construction
with the permutohedron. Then we show that, in the minimal triangulation of
the associahedron, the simplexes can be indexed by parking functions.
A similar indexing is not yet known for the permutohedron.