Meanders and Dyck-Path Billiards

¹ Department of Mathematics, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei 116325, Taiwan, ROC
² Chinese Air Force Academy, Kaohsiung 820009, Taiwan, ROC
³ Department of Applied Mathematics, National Pingtung University, Pingtung 900391, Taiwan, ROC
⁴ Department of Applied Mathematics and Data Science, Tamkang University, New Taipei City 251301, Taiwan, ROC

^* Corresponding author: hchsu0222@gmail.com

Received: 21 December 2024
Accepted: 4 July 2025

Abstract

We study a statistic traj on the ordered pairs (P,Q) of Dyck paths of size n, which counts the number of billiard trajectories in the grid polygon enclosed by P and −Q, where −Q is the path obtained by reflecting Q over the ground line. In terms of grid polygon, we establish an involution on the set of such ordered pairs (P,Q) which either increases or decreases traj(P,Q) by 1. This proves a result by Di Francesco–Golinelli–Guitter that the numbers of semimeanders (meanders, respectively) of order n with even and odd numbers of components are equal if n is even and differ by a Catalan number (the square of a Catalan number, respectively) if n is odd. Some results about (−1)-evaluation of the generating functions for the statistic traj on restricted sets of Dyck paths are also presented.