For one-dimensional growth processes we consider the distribution of the height above a given point of the substrate and study its scale invariance in the limit of large times. We argue that for self-similar growth from a single seed the universal distribution is the Tracy-Widom distribution from the theory of random matrices and that for growth from a flat substrate it is some other, only nume...

The Hammersley process relates to the statistical properties of the maximum length of all up/right paths connecting random points of a given density in the unit square from (0,0) to (1,1). This process can also be interpreted in terms of the height of the polynuclear growth model, or the length of the longest increasing subsequence in a random permutation. The cumulative distribution of the lon...

which consists of an increasing sequence of m decreasing sequences, each of length n/m. The longest increasing subsequence has length m but but the only way for the sample to imply that the input is not sorted is if two chosen elements land in the same decreasing sequence. The probability that this happens is at most ( s 2 ) /m ≤ s/(2m) which is o(1) if s is o( √ m). In particular, for ε = 1/2 ...

Given a distribution G over labeled bipartite (multi) graphs, G = (W; M; E) where jWj = jMj = n, let L(n) denote the size of the largest planar matching of G (here W and M are posets drawn on the plane as two ordered rows of nodes, an upper and a lower one, and a (w; m) edge is drawn as a straight line between w and m). The main focus of this work is to understand the asymptotic (in n) behavior...

The length is(w) of the longest increasing subsequence of a permutation w in the symmetric group Sn has been the object of much investigation. We develop comparable results for the length as(w) of the longest alternating subsequence of w, where a sequence a, b, c, d, . . . is alternating if a > b < c > d < · · · . For instance, the expected value (mean) of as(w) for w ∈ Sn is exactly (4n + 1)/6...

We investigate the probability distribution of the length of the second row of a Young diagram of size N equipped with Plancherel measure. We obtain an expression for the generating function of the distribution in terms of a derivative of an associated Fredholm determinant, which can then be used to show that as N → ∞ the distribution converges to the Tracy-Widom distribution [TW] for the secon...

The authors consider the length, lN , of the length of the longest increasing subsequence of a random permutation of N numbers. The main result in this paper is a proof that the distribution function for lN , suitably centered and scaled, converges to the Tracy-Widom distribution [TW1] of the largest eigenvalue of a random GUE matrix. The authors also prove convergence of moments. The proof is ...

We show that a wide variety of generalized increasing subsequence problems admit a one parameter family of extensions for which we can exactly compute the mean length of the longest increasing subsequence. By the nature of the extension, this gives upper bounds on the mean in the unextended model, which turn out to be asymptotically tight for all of the models that have so far been analyzed. A ...

This paper is concerned with certain connections between the ensemble of n × n unitary matrices—specifically the characteristic function of the random variable tr(U)—and combinatorics—specifically Ulam’s problem concerning the distribution of the length of the longest increasing subsequence in permutation groups—and the appearance of Painlevé functions in the answers to apparently unrelated que...