Grigori Olshanski

The paper deals with a 3-parameter family of probability measures on the set of partitions, called the z-measures. The z-measures first emerged in connection with the problem of harmonic analysis on the infinite symmetric group. They are a special and distinguished case of Okounkov's Schur measures. It is known that any Schur measure determines a determinantal point process on the 1-dimensional lattice. In the particular case of z-measures, the correlation kernel of this process, called the discrete hypergeometric kernel, has especially nice properties. The aim of the paper is to derive the discrete hypergeometric kernel by a new method, based on a relationship between the z-measures and the Meixner orthogonal polynomial ensemble. The present paper can be viewed as an introduction to another our paper where the same approach is applied to studying a dynamical model related to the z-measures (Markov processes on partitions, Prob. Theory Rel. Fields 135 (2006), 84-152; arXiv: math-ph/0409075).

We describe the asymptotic behavior of the multivariate BC-type Jacobi polynomials as the number of variables and the Young diagram indexing the polynomial go to infinity. In particular, our results describe the approximation of the spherical functions of the infinite-dimensional symmetric spaces of type B,C,D or BC by the spherical functions of the corresponding finite-dimensional symmetric spaces. Similar results for the Jack polynomials were established in our earlier paper (Intern. Math. Res. Notices 1998, no. 13, 641-s682; arXiv:q-alg/9709011). The main results of the present paper were obtained in 1997.

We distinguish a class of random point processes which we call Giambelli compatible point processes. Our definition was partly inspired by determinantal identities for averages of products and ratios of characteristic polynomials for random matrices found earlier by Fyodorov and Strahov. It is closely related to the classical Giambelli formula for Schur symmetric functions. We show that orthogonal polynomial ensembles, z-measures on partitions, and spectral measures of characters of generalized regular representations of the infinite symmetric group generate Giambelli compatible point processes. In particular, we prove determinantal identities for averages of analogs of characteristic polynomials for partitions. Our approach provides a direct derivation of determinantal formulas for correlation functions.

The Eulerian triangle is a classical array of combinatorial numbers defined by a linear recursion. The associated boundary problem asks one to find all extreme nonnegative solutions to a dual recursion. Exploiting connections with random permutations and Markov chains we show that the boundary is discrete and explicitly identify its elements.

The graph of zigzag diagrams is a close relative of Young's lattice. The boundary problem for this graph amounts to describing coherent random permutations with descent-set statistic, and is also related to certain positive characters on the algebra of quasi-symmetric functions. We establish connections to some further relatives of Young's lattice and solve the boundary problem by reducing it to the classification of spreadable total orders on integers, as recently obtained by Jacka and Warren.

The graph of zigzag diagrams is a close relative of Young's lattice. The boundary problem for this graph amounts to describing coherent random permuta

We introduce and study a family of Markov processes on partitions. The processes preserve the so-called z-measures on partitions previously studied in connection with harmonic analysis on the infinite symmetric group. We show that the dynamical correlation functions of these processes have determinantal structure and we explicitly compute their correlation kernels. We also compute the scaling limits of the kernels in two different regimes. The limit kernels describe the asymptotic behavior of large rows and columns of the corresponding random Young diagrams, and the behavior of the Young diagrams near the diagonal. Our results show that recently discovered analogy between random partitions arising in representation theory and spectra of random matrices extends to the associated time-dependent models.