Counting lattice chains and Delannoy paths in higher dimensions

Lattice chains and Delannoy paths represent two different ways to progress through a lattice. We use elementary combinatorial arguments to derive new expressions for the number of chains and the number of Delannoy paths in a lattice of arbitrary finite dimension. Specifically, fix nonnegative integers n₁,…,n_d, and let L denote the lattice of points (a₁,…,a_d)∈Z^d that satisfy 0≤a_i≤n_i for 1≤i≤d. We prove that the number of chains in L is given by where . We also show that the number of Delannoy paths in L equals Setting n_i=n (for all i) in these expressions yields a new proof of a recent result of Duchi and Sulanke 9] relating the total number of chains to the central Delannoy numbers. We also give a novel derivation of the generating functions for these numbers in arbitrary dimension.