On Parking Functions and The Tower of Hanoi

Abstract

The displacement of a parking function measures the total difference between where cars want to park and where they ultimately park. In this article, we prove that the set of parking functions of length $n$ with displacement one is in bijection with the set of ideal states in the famous Tower of Hanoi game with $n+1$ disks and $n+1$ pegs, both sets being enumerated by the Lah numbers.

7 pages; 4 figures (5 image files); Final version to appear in The American Mathematical Monthly

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Interval and $\ell$-interval Rational Parking Functions