Section: New Results

A Human Proof of the Gessel Conjecture

Counting lattice paths obeying various geometric constraints is a classical topic in combinatorics and probability theory. Many recent works deal with the enumeration of 2-dimensional walks with prescribed steps confined to the positive quadrant. A notoriously difficult case concerns the so-called Gessel walks: they are planar walks confined to the positive quarter plane, which move by unit steps in any of the West, North-East, East, and South-West directions. In 2001, Ira Gessel conjectured a closed-form expression for the number of such walks of a given length starting and ending at the origin. In 2008, Kauers, Koutschan and Zeilberger gave a computer-aided proof of this conjecture. The same year, Bostan and Kauers showed, using again computer algebra tools, that the trivariate generating function of Gessel walks is algebraic. This year, Alin Bostan, together with Irina Kurkova (Univ. Paris 6) and Kilian Raschel (CNRS and Univ. Tours), proposed in [6] the first “human proofs” of these results. They are derived from a new expression for the generating function of Gessel walks in terms of special functions.