Abstract

We study the zeros of two families of polynomials related to rook theory and matchings in graphs. One of these families is based on the cover polynomial of a digraph introduced by Chung and Graham . Another involves a version of the ‘hit polynomial’ of rook theory, but which applies to weighted matchings in (non-bipartite) graphs. For both of these families we prove a result which is analogous to a theorem of the author, K. Ono, and D. G. Wagner, namely that for Ferrers boards the hit polynomial has only real zeros. We also show that for each of these families there is a general conjecture involving arrays of numbers satisfying inequalities which contains these theorems as special cases. We provide evidence for the truth of these conjectures by proving other special cases and discussing computational experiments.

¹ Email: jhaglund@math.ucsd.edu