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A Young diagram is a graphical way of representing a partition, similar to its Ferrers graph. For comparison, the Ferrers graph and the Young diagram of the partition 5+4+2+1 are shown below.
The 3D analogue of a Young diagram maybe be used to give a graphical representation of a plane partition.
One advantage of Young diagrams is that each lattice path through a grid of height m and width n, say from lower left corner to top right corner with only up- or right steps allowed, corresponds to the Young diagram of a partition with ≤m parts, and largest part ≤n.
Thus the total number of such lattice paths equals the total number of partitions into ≤m parts, each part ≤n. The former number is easily computed, by a simple counting argument, to be
\binom{m+n}{n} = \binom{m+n}{m}.
This is illustrated in the diagram below, where the lattice path in red through the 6 \times 4 lattice shown marks out the boundary of the Young diagram of the partition 4+2+1 (green).
It can be seen that any similar path with up- or right steps from the bottom left corner to top right corner corresponds to a unique partition into \leq 4 parts, with the largest part being \leq 6 (the path that goes bottom left \to top left \to top right and fences off no cells corresponds to the one (empty) partition of 0).
Young diagrams play a part in the definition of hook numbers and t-cores. They play an important role in other areas of combinatorics, and in other areas of mathematics outside of combinatorics.
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