We investigate the groups of units of one-relator and special inverse monoids. These are inverse monoids which are defined by presentations, where all the defining relations are of the form $r=1$. We develop new approaches for finding presentations for the group of units of a special inverse monoid, and apply these methods to give conditions under which the group admits a presentation with the same number of defining relations as the monoid. In particular, our results give sufficient conditions for the group of units of a one-relator inverse monoid to be a one-relator group. When these conditions are satisfied, these results give inverse semigroup theoretic analogues of classical results of Adjan for one-relator monoids, and Makanin for special monoids. In contrast, we show that in general these classical results do not hold for one-relator and special inverse monoids. In particular, we show that there exists a one-relator special inverse monoid whose group of units is not a one-relator group (with respect to any generating set), and we show that there exists a finitely presented special inverse monoid whose group of units is not finitely presented.

A spread-out lattice animal is a finite connected set of edges in $\{\{x,y\}\subset \mathbb{Z}^d\;:\;0\lt \|x-y\|\le L\}$. A lattice tree is a lattice animal with no loops. The best estimate on the critical point $p_{\textrm{c}}$ so far was achieved by Penrose (J. Stat. Phys. 77, 3–15, 1994) : $p_{\textrm{c}}=1/e+O(L^{-2d/7}\log L)$ for both models for all $d\ge 1$. In this paper, we show that $p_{\textrm{c}}=1/e+CL^{-d}+O(L^{-d-1})$ for all $d\gt 8$, where the model-dependent constant $C$ has the random-walk representation

\begin{align*} C_{\textrm{LT}}=\sum _{n=2}^\infty \frac{n+1}{2e}U^{*n}(o),&& C_{\textrm{LA}}=C_{\textrm{LT}}-\frac 1{2e^2}\sum _{n=3}^\infty U^{*n}(o), \end{align*}

$U^{*n}$

$n$

$d$

$\{x\in{\mathbb R}^d\;: \|x\|\le 1\}$

$p$

The factorially normalized Bernoulli polynomials $b_n(x) = B_n(x)/n!$ are known to be characterized by $b_0(x) = 1$ and $b_n(x)$ for $n \gt 0$ is the anti-derivative of $b_{n-1}(x)$ subject to $\int _0^1 b_n(x) dx = 0$. We offer a related characterization: $b_1(x) = x - 1/2$ and $({-}1)^{n-1} b_n(x)$ for $n \gt 0$ is the $n$-fold circular convolution of $b_1(x)$ with itself. Equivalently, $1 - 2^n b_n(x)$ is the probability density at $x \in (0,1)$ of the fractional part of a sum of $n$ independent random variables, each with the beta$(1,2)$ probability density $2(1-x)$ at $x \in (0,1)$. This result has a novel combinatorial analog, the Bernoulli clock: mark the hours of a $2 n$ hour clock by a uniformly random permutation of the multiset $\{1,1, 2,2, \ldots, n,n\}$, meaning pick two different hours uniformly at random from the $2 n$ hours and mark them $1$, then pick two different hours uniformly at random from the remaining $2 n - 2$ hours and mark them $2$, and so on. Starting from hour $0 = 2n$, move clockwise to the first hour marked $1$, continue clockwise to the first hour marked $2$, and so on, continuing clockwise around the Bernoulli clock until the first of the two hours marked $n$ is encountered, at a random hour $I_n$ between $1$ and $2n$. We show that for each positive integer $n$, the event $( I_n = 1)$ has probability $(1 - 2^n b_n(0))/(2n)$, where $n! b_n(0) = B_n(0)$ is the $n$th Bernoulli number. For $ 1 \le k \le 2 n$, the difference $\delta _n(k)\,:\!=\, 1/(2n) -{\mathbb{P}}( I_n = k)$ is a polynomial function of $k$ with the surprising symmetry $\delta _n( 2 n + 1 - k) = ({-}1)^n \delta _n(k)$, which is a combinatorial analog of the well-known symmetry of Bernoulli polynomials $b_n(1-x) = ({-}1)^n b_n(x)$.