Collapsing along monotone poset maps.
Combinatorial topology and the global dimension of algebras arising in combinatorics
In a highly influential paper, Bidigare, Hanlon and Rockmore showed that a number of popular Markov chains are random walks on the faces of a hyperplane arrangement. Their analysis of these Markov chains took advantage of the monoid structure on the set of faces. This theory was later extended by Brown to a larger class of monoids called left regular bands. In both cases, the representation theory of these monoids played a prominent role. In particular, it was used to compute the spectrum of the...
Computing and proving with pivots
A simple idea used in many combinatorial algorithms is the idea of pivoting. Originally, it comes from the method proposed by Gauss in the 19th century for solving systems of linear equations. This method had been extended in 1947 by Dantzig for the famous simplex algorithm used for solving linear programs. From since, a pivoting algorithm is a method exploring subsets of a ground set and going from one subset σ to a new one σ′ by deleting an element inside σ and adding an element outside σ: σ′ = σv} ∪ {u},...
Convex-ear decompositions and the flag -vector.