Symmetric binary Steinhaus triangles and parity-regular Steinhaus graphs

Abstract

A binary Steinhaus triangle is a triangle of zeroes and ones that points down and with the same local rule as the Pascal triangle modulo 2. A binary Steinhaus triangle is said to be rotationally symmetric, horizontally symmetric or dihedrally symmetric if it is invariant under the 120 degrees rotation, the horizontal reflection or both, respectively. The first part of this paper is devoted to the study of linear subspaces of rotationally symmetric, horizontally symmetric and dihedrally symmetric binary Steinhaus triangles. We obtain simple explicit bases for each of them by using elementary properties of the binomial coefficients. A Steinhaus graph is a simple graph with an adjacency matrix whose upper-triangular part is a binary Steinhaus triangle. A Steinhaus graph is said to be even or odd if all its vertex degrees are even or odd, respectively. One of the main results of this paper is the existence of an isomorphism between the linear subspace of even Steinhaus graphs and a certain linear subspace of dihedrally symmetric binary Steinhaus triangles. This permits us to give, in the second part of this paper, an explicit basis for even Steinhaus graphs and for the vector space of parity-regular Steinhaus graphs; i.e., the linear subspace of Steinhaus graphs that are even or odd. Finally, in the last part of this paper, we consider the generalized Pascal triangles, that are triangles of zeroes and ones, that point up now, and always with the same local rule as the Pascal triangle modulo 2. New simple bases for each linear subspace of symmetric generalized Pascal triangles are deduced from the results of the first part.