Transitive Factorizations in the Symmetric Group, and Combinatorial Aspects of Singularity Theory

We consider the determination of the number c_k(α) of ordered factorizations of an arbitrary permutation on n symbols, with cycle distribution α, intok -cycles such that the factorizations have minimal length and the group generated by the factors acts transitively on then symbols. The case k =  2 corresponds to the celebrated result of Hurwitz on the number of topologically distinct holomorphic functions on the 2-sphere that preserve a given number of elementary branch point singularities. In this case the monodromy group is the full symmetric group. For k =  3, the monodromy group is the alternating group, and this is another case that, in principle, is of considerable interest. We conjecture an explicit form, for arbitrary k, for the generating series for c_k(α), and prove that it holds for factorizations of permutations with one, two and three cycles (so α is a partition with at most three parts). Our approach is to determine a differential equation for the generating series from a combinatorial analysis of the creation and annihilation of cycles in products under the minimality condition.