Preimages under the Queuesort algorithm

Abstract: Following the footprints of what have been done with the algorithm Stacksort, we investigate the preimages of the map associated with a slightly less well known algorithm, called Queuesort. After having described an equivalent version of Queuesort, we provide a recursive description of the set of all preimages of a given permutation, which can be also translated into a recursive procedure to effectively find such preimages. We then deal with some enumerative issues. More specifically, we investigate the cardinality of the set of preimages of a given permutation, showing that all cardinalities are possible, except for 3. We also give exact enumeration results for the number of permutations having 0,1 and 2 preimages. Finally, we consider the special case of those permutations $\pi$ whose set of left-to-right maxima is the disjoint union of a prefix and a suffix of $\pi$: we determine a closed formula for the number of preimages of such permutations, which involves two different incarnations of ballot numbers, and we show that our formula can be expressed as a linear combination of Catalan numbers.