On the equivalence problem for succession rules Original Research Article

The notion of succession rule (system for short) provides a powerful tool for the enumeration of many classes of combinatorial objects. Often, different systems exist for a given class of combinatorial objects, and a number of problems arise naturally. An important one is the equivalence problem between two different systems. In this paper, we show how to solve this problem in the case of systems having a particular form. More precisely, using a bijective proof, we show that the classical system defining the sequence of Catalan numbers is equivalent to a system obtained by linear combinations of labels of the first one.