Some Combinatorial Properties of Schubert Polynomials

Schubert polynomials were introduced by Bernstein et al. and Demazure, and were extensively developed by Lascoux, Schützenberger, Macdonald, and others. We give an explicit combinatorial interpretation of the Schubert polynomial in terms of the reduced decompositions of the permutation w. Using this result, a variation of Schensted's correspondence due to Edelman and Greene allows one to associate in a natural way a certain set of tableaux with w, each tableau contributing a single term to . This correspondence leads to many problems and conjectures, whose interrelation is investigated. In Section 2 we consider permutations with no decreasing subsequence of length three (or 321-avoiding permutations). We show for such permutations that is a flag skew Schur function. In Section 3 we use this result to obtain some interesting properties of the rational function , where denotes a skew Schur function.Sara C. Billey: Supported by the National Physical Science Consortium. William Jockusch: Supported by an NSF Graduate Fellowship. Richard P. Stanley: Partially supported by NSF grants DMS-8901834 and DMS-9206374