Greetings to all.

It is a new year (for some time now) and I am writing to indicate that the mathematical adventures with cycle index computations and Maple continue!

Here are the previous installments:

• Power Group Enumeration
• Fascinating cycle indices with Maple
• The enumeration of non-isomorphic graphs
• Automorphisms of the Petersen Graph.

My purpose this time is to alert readers who might be interested to a new cycle index computation that is neither an application of the classical form of the Polya Enumeration Theorem (PET) nor of Power Group Enumeration. The former counts objects being distributed into slots with a group acting on the slots and the latter objects going into slots with a second group which permutes the objects in addition to the slots being permuted. What I am about to present treats a third possible case: when the slot permutation group and the object permutation group are one and the same and act simultaneously (not exactly the same but induced by the action of a single group).

This requires quite radical proceedings in the etymological sense of the word, which is to go back to the roots of a problem. It seems that after working with the PET sooner or later one is confronted with enumeration problems that demand the original unmitigated power of Burnside's lemma, sometimes called the lemma that is not Burnside's. This is the case with the following problem. Suppose you have an N-by-N matrix whose entries are values from 1 to N, with all assignments allowed and the symmetric group on N elements acts on the row and column indices permuting rows and columns as well as the entries simultaneously. We ask how many such matrices there are taking these double symmetries into account. This also counts the number of closed binary operations on a set of N elemnents and there is a discussion as well as the Maple code (quite simple in my opinion and no more than a few lines) that solves this problem at the following Math Stackexchange link, which uses Lovasz Formula for the cycle index of the symmetric group which some readers may remember.

In continuing the saga of Polya and Burnside exploration I have often reflected on how best to encapsulate these techniques in a Maple package. With this latest installment it would appear that a command to do Burnside enumeration probably ought to be part of such a package.

Best regards,

Marko Riedel

Dear friends. 

This is to alert you to a minor problem with your website. I use a variety of operating systems and browsers to access your site. With Firefox 22 and Firefox 26 and OpenSuse 12.2 when I click on a question with a lot of commentary like "Perl vs. Maple (MPF)" from a couple of days ago or "collect x/2-y/2 1/2" the question appears to load for a while but then an empty page appears, containing only the string "2014" and nothing else. Maybe you want to look into this.

Best regards,

Marko Riedel

Greetings to all.

This past year I have on occasion shared mathematical adventures with cycle index computations and Maple, e.g. at these links:

• Fascinating cycle indices with Maple
• The enumeration of non-isomorphic graphs
• Automorphisms of the Petersen Graph.

Befitting the season I am sending another post to continue this series of cycle index computations. I present two Maple implementations of Power Group Enumeration as described by Harary and Palmer in their book "Graphical Enumeration" and by Fripertinger in his paper "Enumeration in Musical Theory." It was a real joy working with Maple to implement the computational aspects of their work, i.e. the Power Group Enumeration Theorem. Moreover the resulting software is easy to read, simple and powerful and has a straightforward interface, taking advantage of many different capabilities present in Maple.

The problem I am treating is readily described. Consider a cube in 3 space and its symmetries under rotation, i.e. rigid motions. We ask in how many different ways we may color the edges of the cube with at most N colors where all colors are completely interchangable, i.e. have the symmetric group acting on them in addition to the edge permutation group of the cube. At the following Math Stackexchange Link  I have posted the Maple code to implement the algorithms / formulas of Harary / Palmer / Fripertinger to solve this problem. The reader is invited to study and test these algorithms. It seems to me an excellent instance of computational combinatorics fun.

To conclude I would like to point out that these algorithms might be candidates for a Polya Enumeration Theorem (PET) package that I have been suggesting for a future Maple release at the above posts, the algorithms being of remarkable simplicity while at the same time providing surprisingly sophisticated combinatorics and enumeration methods.

Season's greetings!

Marko Riedel

Greetings to all.

As some of you may remember I made several personal story type posts concerning my progress in solving enumeration problems with the Polya Enumeration Theorem (PET). This theorem would seem to be among the most exciting in mathematics and it is of an amazing simplicity so that I never cease to suggest to mathematics teachers to present it to gifted students even before university. My previous efforts are documented at your site, namely at this MaplePrimes link I and this MaplePrimes link II.

I have been able to do another wonderful cycle index computation using Maple recently and I would like to share the Maple code for this problem, which is posted at Math StackExchange.com (this post includes the code) This time we are trying to compute the cycle index of the automorphism group of the 3-by-3-by-3 cube under rotations and reflections. I suggest you try this problem yourself before you look at my solution. Enjoy!

I mentioned in some of my other posts concerning PET that Maple really ought to come with a library of cycle indices and the functions to manipulate them. I hope progress has been made on this issue. I had positive feedback on this at the time here at your website. Do observe that you have an opportinuity here to do very attractive mathematics if you prepare a worksheet documenting cycle index facilities that you may eventually provide. This is good publicity owing to the fact that you can include images of the many geometric objects that appear which all look quite enticing and moreover potential readers get rewarded quickly as they discover that it takes little effort to master this theorem and proceed to work with symmetries themselves and investigate them. This sort of thing also makes nice slides.

With best wishes for happy combinatorics computing,

Marko Riedel

Greetings to all.

I have been using the numtheory package for quite some time now and it has helped me advance on a number of problems. Recently an issue came to my attention that I have known about for a long time but somehow never realized that it can be fixed. This is the fact that the numtheory package does not know about Dirichlet series, finite and infinite. Here are two links: