Papers

The purpose of this work is twofold. In the first part, we consider layered mixed matrices introduced by Murota, relate them to existing notions in combinatorial commutative algebra, and investigate the irreducibility of their determinants. Furthermore, for a layered mixed matrix in combinatorial canonical form, we determine the sparsity structure of its inverse. That is, we characterize which entries of the inverse are nonzero. In the second part, we establish for the first time a formal connection between these algebraic results and the theory of buffering structures for reaction networks developed by Mochizuki and Okada. We identify the lattice of buffering structures with the lattice of order ideals of the block poset of the combinatorial canonical form of the associated layered mixed matrix. This allows us to characterize the reducibility of the symbolic Jacobian determinant as a polynomial in the reaction-rate derivatives, as well as the nonzero sensitivity responses of species concentrations to reaction-rate perturbations.

The Prouhet–Tarry–Escott (PTE) problem has many generalizations and has been studied in various algebraic domains. In this paper, we prove that finite subsets $S$ of integral domains with small additive doubling constant (but still a power of $|S|$) always contain solutions to Wright's generalization of the PTE problem: there are small subsets $A$ and $B$ of the same size such that $\sum_{a\in A} a^j=\sum_{b\in B} b^j$ for $1\le j\le k$, but not for $j=k+1$. More generally, our method gives simultaneous solutions for $m$ systems, with pairwise distinct $(k+1)$-th power sums. In contrast with the classical case $S\subseteq [N]$, where the problem has been studied by Wooley and others using Vinogradov's mean value theorem, our approach is based on polynomial identities and additive properties of $S$. We also discuss barriers to extending these results to broader settings.

Maxwell observed that the graph of any rigid generic framework in $\mathbb{R}^d$ on $n$ vertices has at least $dn-\binom{d+1}{2}$ edges. In this article we prove that graphs whose complement has maximum degree at most two and no component isomorphic to a triangle or a square are rigid in the maximum dimension allowed by this observation. In particular, this determines the precise maximum dimension in which the graph obtained from a complete graph $K_{2m}$ by deleting a perfect matching is rigid, resolving a recent conjecture of Lew. We also deduce bounds on the rigidity of complements of bounded-degree graphs more generally, which significantly improve existing degree-based bounds.

Let $I$ be a monomial ideal in a standard graded polynomial ring and let $\overline{I}$ denote its integral closure. We study the relationship between $\mathrm{v}(I)$ and $\mathrm{v}(\overline{I})$. We prove that $\mathrm{v}(\overline{I}) \leq \mathrm{v}(I)$ for monomial ideals in two variables, for equigenerated monomial ideals in three variables and for several special classes of monomial ideals, while providing examples showing that this inequality does not hold in general. For the edge ideal $I(G)$ of a connected graph $G$, we show that $\mathrm{v}(I(G)^k)=\mathrm{v}(\overline{I(G)^k}) = 2k-1$ for all $k \geq 1+|E(G)|$. Moreover, when $G$ is disconnected, we prove that $\mathrm{v}(\overline{I(G)^k})\leq\mathrm{v}({I(G)^k})$ for all sufficiently large $k$.

We investigate the $L_2$ Turán problems for various small directed graphs, specifically focusing on self-converse tournaments and stability versions. First, we determine the exact maximum $L_2$ norm squared of the out-degree sequence for digraphs avoiding the transitive tournament $TT_4$ and the strongly connected tournament $R_4$, answering open questions from recent paper. We prove that the complete directed 3-partite Turán graph $T_3(m)$ exactly maximizes the $L_2$ norm squared for $TT_4$-free digraphs. For $R_4$-free digraphs, the maximum is achieved by $T_3(m)$ except when $m \equiv 1 \pmod 3$, where peeling off a terminal sink vertex to form $T_3(m-1) \to v$ strictly increases the objective. We complement these results with exact values and a conjecture for the regular tournament $Reg_5$. Furthermore, we prove a stability version for $\vec{C}_3$-free digraphs: any sequence of digraphs asymptotically achieving the maximum $L_2$ density must have an edit distance of $O(\delta^{1/2})m^2$ to the extremal ordered digon-chain $\vec{F}_{m,2}$.

We study the distribution of the positive sojourn time for a one-dimensional two state quantum walk, conditioned on return to the origin. Konno showed that, for the Hadamard walk, this conditional distribution is exactly uniform at times divisible by $4$. In this paper, we investigate whether this finite time exact uniformity characterizes the Hadamard coin within the family of rotation coins. For a fixed initial state, we prove that the following three conditions are equivalent for rotation coins: the conditional distribution is exactly uniform at time $8$; the conditional distribution is exactly uniform at every time $4m$ with $m\ge2$; and the coin is the Hadamard coin. Thus, the uniformity phenomenon found by Konno is characterized as a rigidity phenomenon of the Hadamard coin within the rotation coin family. The proof uses a matrix-valued generating function for paths returning to the origin. We analyze the algebraic structure arising from an absorbing process on the half line. Finally, by comparing low degree coefficients at time $8$, we show that exact uniformity forces the rotation coin to be the Hadamard coin.

We study linear codes for insertion and deletion (insdel) errors through the lens of evaluation codes. We develop a general framework for analyzing random puncturings of evaluation codes, where the edit distance is controlled by only the size of the evaluation domain and the maximum number of zeros of a nonzero function in the underlying function space. Our proof generalizes the results of Con, Guo, Li, and Zhang (ICALP 2025), and simultaneously simplifies their arguments by avoiding an in-depth analysis of longest common subsequences. We demonstrate the applicability of our core theorem by instantiating it with random puncturings of Reed–Muller codes. We then recover the result that random Reed–Solomon codes approach the half-Singleton bound over linear-sized fields while also improving the dependence on the additive gap $\varepsilon$ from $2^{O(1/\varepsilon^2)}$ to $2^{O(1/\varepsilon)}$. Finally, by applying the framework to algebraic geometry codes arising from asymptotically good towers of function fields, we show that there exist randomized families of structured linear codes over constant-sized fields that approach the half-Singleton bound.

In this paper we first introduce the \emph{infinite multi-row periodic pattern of shape $\alpha$} as a geometric realization of $\mathbf{C}_\alpha$. We then give an explicit formula for the coefficients $b^{\lambda}_{\alpha,\beta}$ appearing in the species decomposition \[ \mathbf{C}_\alpha \times \mathbf{C}_\beta = \sum_{\lambda \vdash n} b^\lambda_{\alpha,\beta}\,\mathbf{C}_\lambda. \]

Algebraic combinatorics often seeks bijections that explain identities between distributions object by object. Encoding combinatorial objects as words lets automata theory study such a bijection as a word-to-word computation and measure its memory, input access, and control of output order. This refines existence questions by asking which computational mechanisms a bijection requires. We develop this viewpoint for Dyck paths. Our motivating example is the $q,t$-Catalan polynomial. Let $D_n$ be the set of Dyck paths of semilength $n$, let $D=\bigcup_{n\ge 0}D_n$, and let $area, dinv, bounce \colon D\to\mathbb{N}$ be the standard statistics. Then, \[ C_n(q,t)=\sum_{P\in D_n}q^{area(P)}t^{bounce(P)} =\sum_{P\in D_n}q^{dinv(P)}t^{area(P)}. \] Haglund's zeta map $\zeta\colon D\to D$ gives a bijective proof: it preserves semilength and sends $(dinv,area)$ to $(area,bounce)$. By contrast, the full symmetry $C_n(q,t)=C_n(t,q)$ still lacks a direct explanation: no explicit, uniform, semilength-preserving bijection is known that swaps area and dinv on every Dyck path. Polyregular maps from automata theory provide a natural computational starting point, but we prove that neither $\zeta$ nor the classical height-sweep bijection witnessing Narayana symmetry is polyregular. The missing mechanism is global ordering by numerical levels whose range grows with the input. We call this a rank sort and introduce weighted-rank polyregular maps (WRP), extending polyregular maps by one such sort and containing both bijections. Nevertheless, WRP is a proper subclass of deterministic logspace. We prove that $\zeta^{-1}$ lies outside WRP and that no WRP map can realise a semilength-preserving area-dinv swap. Thus the rank-sorting strategy behind $\zeta$ cannot be extended within WRP to exchange the two statistics.

For each fixed positive integer $h$, we study the divisibility relation $\sigma(n)\mid\sigma(n+h)$. We isolate an explicit regular family arising from integral quotients of shifted abundancy indices and show that the complementary set satisfies a subexponential saving; in particular, the number of solutions up to $x$ is $O_h(x/(\log x)^2)$. We also study the proportionality equation $\sigma(n+h)=\lambda\sigma(n)$. For every fixed nonzero integer $h$, uniformly for all real $\lambda>0$, the number of solutions up to $x$ is $O(x/\sqrt{\log\log\log x})$, with an absolute implied constant once $x$ exceeds an $h$-dependent threshold. Finally, we give an explicit family which, under Schinzel's Hypothesis $H$, produces infinitely many solutions of $\sigma(n+1)=2\sigma(n)$; the Bateman–Horn conjecture yields a precise asymptotic for the number of members of this family up to $x$. We conjecture that $\sigma(n+h)=k\sigma(n)$ has infinitely many positive integer solutions for every fixed $h,k\ge1$.

Tree-child networks are a useful class of binary phylogenetic networks. The Pons–Batle identity (Pons and Batle, Scientific Reports, 2021) states that the number $a_{n,k}$ of tree-child networks with $k$ reticulations on $n$ taxa satisfies \[ a_{n,k}=(n-k+1)a_{n,k-1} +\frac{n(2n+k-3)}{n-k}a_{n-1,k}. \] In this paper, we present a short combinatorial proof of this identity.

A colorful graph relation enhances the minor relation by merging color sets along contractions and by allowing the removal of colors; it generalizes rooted minors and models problems on graphs with several, possibly overlapping, annotated vertex sets. A graph has the Erdős-Pósa property for minors if and only if it is planar, by a classical theorem of Robertson and Seymour. In this work we determine, for the colorful minor relation, exactly which colorful graphs have the Erdős-Pósa property. Our characterization takes three equivalent forms. The first is structural: the colorful graphs with the property are those that can be drawn with all their colored vertices on one face and whose colors are, in a precise sense, laid out along that face without interleaving. The second is given by an obstruction set: they are those excluding every member of an explicit infinite family $\mathcal{O},$ of which only $\mathbf{O}(|I|^{4})$ members have colors that are a subset of $I,$ for every finite set $I$ of colors. The third is grid-like: they are exactly the colorful minors of unions of particular families of segregated grids, the colorful analogues of the grids that drive the classical proof.

For a finite abelian group $G$ and $k \geq 1$, the generalized Davenport constant $D_k(G)$ is the least $\ell$ such that every sequence over $G$ of length at least $\ell$ has $k$ pairwise disjoint nonempty zero-sum subsequences. A theorem of Freeze and Schmid gives $D_k(C_5^3) \geq 5k+10$ for every $k \geq 2$. We prove the matching upper bound: $D_4(C_5^3)=30$, and hence $D_k(C_5^3)=5k+10$ for every $k \geq 2$, so the Freeze–Schmid bound is attained by $C_5^3$ from $k=2$ onward, as it is by $C_2^3$ and unlike $C_3^3$. The proof is finite and computer-assisted. The remaining case reduces to showing that every zero-sum sequence of length $31$ over $C_5^3$ contains a nonempty zero-sum subsequence of length at most five. A saturation argument confines the multiplicities of a hypothetical counterexample to $\{1,2,4\}$, its support pattern to one of $60$ solutions of two linear equations, and its geometry to one of $78$ rank/plane branches normalized to a standard basis; an exhaustive search exhausts every branch with no survivor. The search was carried out by three independently written implementations, and the branch cover was regenerated by separate programs from the lemmas alone; two further machine-verified values, $D_3(C_5^3)=25$ and $s_{\leq 6}(C_5^3)=24$, enter the second statement, and their records accompany the paper.

Let $\mathcal I_n^B$ be the involutions of the hyperoctahedral group $\mathfrak B_n$, and let $\des^B$ denote the descent number with respect to the natural Coxeter order. We derive the fixed-point-refined Worpitzky identity \[ \sum_{n\ge0}\frac{\mathcal F_n(p,t)\,z^n}{(1-t)^{n+1}} =\sum_{m\ge0} \frac{(1+pz)^m\,t^m}{(1-pz)^{m+1}(1-z^2)^{m(m+1)}}, \quad \mathcal F_n(p,t)=\sum_{\pi\in\mathcal I_n^B}p^{\fixB(\pi)}t^{\des^B(\pi)}. \] Extracting the stratum with $j$ two-cycles and $f$ fixed positions yields a one-parameter deformation of the fixed-point-free Worpitzky series of Wan, Gao, Li and Yang. After the change of variables $x=t/(1+t)^2$, this deformation becomes a positive binomial transform. More precisely, if \[ P_j(x)=\sum_sD_{2j,s}x^s \] is the fixed-point-free $\gamma$-polynomial, then the transform coefficients $A_{j,r}(x)$ are determined by \[ \sum_{r\ge0}A_{j,r}(x)W^r =\sum_{s=0}^{j}D_{2j,s}x^s (1+4xW)^{2j-2s}(1+2W+4xW^2)^s, \] and the $\gamma$-polynomial of the $(j,f)$-stratum is \[ \Phi_{j,f}(x)=\sum_{r=0}^{f}\binom fr A_{j,r}(x). \] This manifestly positive transform is the main structural result of the paper. As consequences, every fixed cycle-type stratum is $\gamma$-positive and $\mathcal F_n(p,t)$ is coefficientwise $\gamma$-positive in the fixed-point variable $p$. The cases $f=0$ and $p=1$ recover, respectively, the fixed-point-free theorem of Wan–Gao–Li–Yang and the all-involution theorem of Cao–Liu. We also give explicit formulas for the first binomial layers and for the strata with one and two two-cycles.

A symmetric $(v,k,\lambda)$-design is said to be $f$-pyramidal, with $f<v-1$, under the action of a group $G$ if $G$ acts as an automorphism group fixing $f$ points and acting sharply transitively on the remaining ones. We show that, necessarily, $f\leq v -2(k-\lambda)$. In particular, for a Hadamard design with parameters $(v,k,\lambda)=(4m-1, 2m-1, m-1)$, for some $m\in\mathbb{N}$, it follows that $f\leq 2m-1$. Recently, working on the complement design, the family $P$ of Hadamard $(4m-1,2m-1,m-1)$-designs admitting an abelian $(2m-1)$-pyramidal automorphism group $G$ has been completely determined in the case $m=2^{k}>1$. In this paper, we generalize that result by showing that $P$ coincides with the family of Hadamard $(4m-1,2m-1,m-1)$-designs admitting a $(2m-1)$-pyramidal automorphism group, without assuming either that the group is abelian or that $m$ is a power of $2$.

Classes of squarefree monomial ideals were intensively studied being an important connection between two main areas in mathematics: commutative algebra and combinatorics. Many algebraic invariants of the squarefree monomial ideals are given in terms of properties of the combinatorial associated objects (graphs, simplicial complexes etc.).

We establish Gaussian free field fluctuations for uniformly random lozenge tilings of simply connected polygonal domains with $3d$ sides whose directions cycle through the three lattice directions. More precisely, assuming that the liquid region is connected and that the boundary data do not force the height at any interior point, we prove that the fluctuations of centered height function converge to the Gaussian free field in the liquid region, confirming a prediction of Kenyon and Okounkov from 2007. We introduce a tiling action function that encodes the geometry of the limit shape through its critical points. The action function has a complex conjugate pair of critical points in the liquid region, repeated real critical points on the arctic boundary, and distinct real critical points in the frozen region. Using this tiling action function, we construct an approximation to the inverse Kasteleyn matrix in terms of explicit single-contour and double-contour integrals and prove that the approximation is uniform throughout the polygonal domain. The convergence to the Gaussian free field then follows from standard kernel computations.

Albertson's conjecture asserts that every finite simple graph $G$ with $\chi(G) \ge r$ satisfies $\operatorname{cr}(G) \ge \operatorname{cr}(K_r)$. Building on Cranston's verification for $r \le 24$ and his reduction of $r \in \{25,26\}$ to three residual orders, we eliminate those residual cases and then prove the cases $r=27,28,29$. The first structural ingredient is a Kempe-chain construction: if a $k$-critical graph has a vertex of degree $k-1$, then it contains a branch-clean essential immersion of $K_k$. Essential immersions are crossing-monotone, so a critical counterexample must have minimum degree at least $k$. For $r=27$, this one-unit degree gain, Gallai's join structure, critical-graph edge bounds, and induced-subgraph averaging close every possible order. For $r=28$ and $r=29$, the remaining near-$2r$ orders are converted to dense complements. Stehlík's coloring theorem makes the odd-order complements factor-critical; a clique-partition obstruction yields an anti-tight matching property; and Tutte barriers, Hall-type expansion, and deficit bookkeeping eliminate the final cases. At order 58 for $r=29$, Rabern's coloring inequality handles the regular case, while the last degree-deficit-two case is reduced to two disjoint triangles and a finite barrier analysis.

The resistance Laplacian is a graph matrix associated with the effective resistance metric and provides a global counterpart of the classical graph Laplacian. Although it inherits several fundamental properties of the ordinary Laplacian, including a connected graph partitioning theorem analogous to that of Fiedler, its intrinsic spectral structure has remained largely unexplored. In this paper, we develop a structural theory of the resistance Laplacian. We derive a canonical decomposition that separates its intrinsic, average, and deviation components, thereby revealing how the global geometry induced by effective resistance differs from the local geometry encoded by the ordinary Laplacian. Building upon this decomposition, we establish several structural and spectral properties of the associated deviation operator, obtain variational characterizations of the largest eigenvalue and its corresponding eigenspace, and express the resistance Laplacian in Laplacian coordinates, thereby elucidating the relationship between the eigenspaces of the two operators. Finally, we formulate resistance-based graph partitioning objectives whose spectral relaxations recover the dominant eigenvector of the resistance Laplacian, providing a variational interpretation of the connected partition theorem. Experimental results on synthetic and real-life datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for graph partitioning, data clustering, and exploratory anomaly detection.

The size-Ramsey number $\widehat{R}_k(\mathcal G)$ of a $k$-uniform hypergraph $\mathcal G$ is the minimum number of edges in a $k$-uniform hypergraph $\mathcal H$ such that every $2$-edge-coloring of $\mathcal H$ contains a monochromatic copy of $\mathcal G$. Fox asked whether, for fixed $2\le \ell<k$, the size-Ramsey number of every $k$-uniform relaxed $\ell$-tree on $n$ vertices is bounded by a polynomial in $n$, as recorded by Dudek, La Fleur, Mubayi and Rödl. We give a negative answer when $\ell+1\le k\le 2\ell-2$. More precisely, for every sufficiently large $n$, we construct a $k$-uniform relaxed $\ell$-tree $\bar{\mathcal T}_{n,\ell}^{(k)}$ on exactly $n$ vertices such that \[ \widehat{R}_k\bigl(\bar{\mathcal T}_{n,\ell}^{(k)}\bigr) \ge 2^{c_{k,\ell}n^{\,1-1/(2\ell-k)}}, \] where $c_{k,\ell}>0$ depends only on $k$ and $\ell$. Moreover, any two distinct edges of the construction intersect in at most $2\ell-k-1$ vertices. In contrast, for $k\ge 2\ell$, we prove that every $k$-uniform relaxed $\ell$-tree $\bar{\mathcal T}_{n,\ell}^{(k)}$ on $n$ vertices satisfies \[ \widehat{R}_k\bigl(\bar{\mathcal T}_{n,\ell}^{(k)}\bigr) =O_{k,\ell}(n^{2k}). \]

For a graph $G$, let $i_k(G)$ denote the number of independent sets of cardinality $k$, and let \[ I(G,z)=\sum_{k\ge0} i_k(G)z^k \] be its independence polynomial. Following Brown and Cameron \cite{BrownCameron2018}, a graph is called stable if all zeros of its independence polynomial lie in the closed left half-plane. They proved that every star is stable, but also constructed nonstable trees. They then asked for a characterization of stable trees. In this paper, we extend and strengthen their result by proving that every spider, obtained from a star by arbitrary and possibly nonuniform subdivisions of its edges, has all its independence roots in the open left half-plane. Hence, every spider is stable.

The Erdos-Gyarfas conjecture states that every graph with minimum degree at least 3 contains a cycle whose length is a power of two. We prove by a SAT-based exhaustive search, certified by DRAT proofs, that every graph with minimum degree at least 3 on at most 23 vertices contains a cycle of length 4 or a cycle of length 8; consequently any counterexample has at least 24 vertices, improving the previously published bound of 16, and the smallest graph of minimum degree 3 with no 4-cycle and no 8-cycle has exactly 24 vertices. We show that the lemma underlying Exoo's 450-vertex construction for the bound f(5) at most 450 is false: the Tutte-Coxeter graph contains 8-cycles alternating between outer and chord edges, and the graph as specified contains 32-cycles. We repair the construction and verify the corrected graph, so the bound stands. We also give an exact window calculus for vertex-replacement constructions, prove that f(k) is at most 15 times the order of the smallest known cubic graph of girth 2 to the power (k-2) plus 1 for all k at least 4 (in particular f(6) is at most 32640, the first bound for f(6)), and show that Exoo's 78-vertex witness for f(4) at most 78 is optimal among gadget designs on bases with at most 12 vertices. All graphs, scripts and certificates are archived at doi:10.5281/zenodo.22180583.

The quantum chromatic number is a fundamental parameter in the study of nonlocal games, capturing the extent to which entanglement can improve performance in distributed tasks. In this paper, we investigate the quantum chromatic number of generalized Johnson graphs. By constructing modulus-one orthogonal representations, we obtain general upper bounds on their quantum chromatic numbers. We further analyze the smallest eigenvalue of these graphs. Combining the resulting Hoffman-type lower bounds with the upper bounds obtained from orthogonal representations, we determine the exact quantum chromatic numbers of two infinite families of generalized Johnson graphs. Finally, applying a forbidden-distance theorem for binary codes, we show that the classical chromatic numbers of these families grow exponentially with $n$, whereas their quantum chromatic numbers grow linearly. These families exhibit an exponential separation between the classical and quantum chromatic numbers.

We study the inverse-weight Lin–Lu–Yau Ricci flow on finite trees, and prove the convergence of the curvature on every edge via its diffusion equation. Moreover, the limiting curvature is the unique minimum-norm point of a polyhedron determined by the tree. We characterize possible limits of the normalized edge weights, give criteria for their convergence, and show that different positive initial metrics have equivalent omega-limit sets.

We classify weighted small-step lattice walks in the quadrant whose associated birational group is finite. Using an algebro-geometric description of the kernel curves and Cayley-type finite-order conditions, we relate the group $G_W$ of a walk to the family of groups $\Gamma_t$ acting on its kernel curves. Together with the uniform upper bound on the order of $G_W$, this allows us to analyse all possible finite orders. We obtain explicit necessary and sufficient conditions for the group to have order 4, 6, 8, or 10, and prove that no weighted walk in the quadrant has a group of order 12. This yields a complete classification of weighted quadrant walks with finite groups.

We analyze random constructions of independent sets in locally sparse graphs, specifically graphs with bounded maximum average degree in neighborhoods or with fractionally $r$-colorable neighborhoods. Specializing our methods to finding large independent sets and low-weight fractional colorings, we focus on optimizing for marginals, but we also derive results that find many independent sets (i.e.\ give lower bounds on the independence polynomial) by optimizing for entropy. Our main results generalize the local Shearer bound of Martinsson and Steiner for triangle-free graphs to graphs with few triangles and to graphs with fractionally $r$-colorable neighborhoods, in the latter case improving upon a result of Dhawan. We also extend independence polynomial bounds obtained via induction to such graphs, improving upon known bounds obtained by local occupancy by relaxing the necessary hypotheses from a maximum degree condition to an average degree condition.

Let $R_r(k)$ denote the diagonal $r$-colour Ramsey number. We prove that there exist absolute constants $c,K>0$ such that $R_r(k)\le r^{rk}\exp\!\left(-c\frac{k}{r\log^2(2r)}\right)$ for every $r\ge2$ and every $k\ge Kr^2\log^6(2r)$. This improves the exponential saving in a recent bound of Yang and Mao by a factor of order $r\log^2(2r)$. The proof proceeds through an off-diagonal bound, which asymptotically improves the classical multinomial bound throughout a neighbourhood of the diagonal.

A quaternary Legendre pair of length $\ell$ is a pair of sequences over the fourth roots of unity whose periodic autocorrelations sum to $-2$ at every nonzero shift. Each such pair yields a quaternary Hadamard matrix of order $2\ell+2$ and a binary Hadamard matrix of order $4\ell+4$. Fourteen even lengths up to 100 remained open in the 2025 tables of Kotsireas, Koutschan and Winterhof and of Jedwab and Pender. We settle seven of them — the four smallest open lengths, 42, 46, 52, and 58, together with 66, 72, and 80 — and print every pair in full. Checking one takes a few lines of code and exact arithmetic over the Gaussian integers, so the main results can be confirmed without running any of our software. Each search writes a pair as four binary sequences under a Gray map, restricts to reflection-symmetric rows, imposes an exact spectral constraint at the midpoint frequency, and matches candidates meet-in-the-middle on their autocorrelation vectors; from length 52 onward, exact compression along divisor chains shrinks the search before any candidate is lifted. Everything is deterministic: no seed, heuristic stopping rule, or floating-point value enters an acceptance decision. At lengths 64, 70 and 76 the same machinery ran to exhaustion and found nothing: the reversible four-block queue built at each length contains no pair. These are exhaustions of a specific recorded queue, not nonexistence results, and the certificates do not by themselves establish that the queue captures every reversible object of its length. A closing section sorts every claim in the paper by what a reader must accept in order to believe it, and states exactly how far the accompanying artifacts support each one.

A finite simple graph $G$ is called a cograph if it does not contain the path on four vertices $P_4$ as an induced subgraph. It is classically known that the family of cographs are well-quasi-ordered by the induced subgraph relation \cite{D}. In preceding work of Knudsen and the third author \cite[Theorem 7.2]{KR}, it was shown that this well-quasi-order statement admitted a categorification, which allowed those authors to prove universal finite generation statements about the homology groups of configuration spaces on cographs \cite[Theorem 1.5]{KR}. In this work, we expand \cite[Theorem 7.2]{KR} to be compatible with the family of polynomial rings on the vertex sets of cographs. By consequence, we are able to prove a number of universality results related with edge and toric ideals of these polynomial ring, partially generalizing and expanding upon work of Kahle \cite{kahle2019binomial}. We also conclude strong restrictions on the kinds of topologies that can arise from graph complexes and anchored configuration spaces associated to cographs, as well as combinatorial constraints on the possible combinatorics of hyperplane arrangements of cographs.

We give a degree-one Pieri formula for integral nonsymmetric Jack polynomials. In direct analogy with the symmetric case, its coefficients are described by a combinatorial device called jeu de fleches, a filling of composition diagrams. The proof is self-contained and uses reflection and raising recursions which appear to be new