Extensions of Riordan Arrays and Their Applications

The Riordan group of Riordan arrays was first described in 1991, and since then, it has provided useful tools for the study of areas such as combinatorial identities, polynomial sequences (including families of orthogonal polynomials), lattice path enumeration, and linear recurrences. Useful extensions of the idea of a Riordan array have included almost Riordan arrays, double Riordan arrays, and their generalizations. After giving a brief overview of the Riordan group, we define two further extensions of the notion of Riordan arrays, and we give a number of applications for these extensions. The relevance of these applications indicates that these new extensions are worthy of study. The first extension is that of the reverse symmetrization of a Riordan array, for which we give two applications. The first application of this symmetrization is to the study of a family of Riordan arrays whose symmetrizations lead to the famous Robbins numbers as well as to numbers associated with the 20 vertex model of mathematical physics. We provide closed-form expressions for the elements of these arrays, and we also give a canonical Catalan factorization for them. We also describe an alternative family of Riordan arrays whose symmetrizations lead to the same integer sequences. The second application of this symmetrization process is to the area of the enumeration of lattice paths. We remain with the applications to lattice paths for the second extension of Riordan arrays that we introduce, which is the interleaved Riordan array . The methods used include generating functions, linear algebra, weighted compositions, and linear recurrences. In the case of the symmetrization process applied to Riordan arrays, we focus on the principal minor sequences of the resulting square matrices in the context of integrable lattice models.