On the congruences of some combinatorial numbers

Abstract

In this paper, we apply Lucas' theorem to evaluate the congruences of several combinatorial numbers, including the central Delannoy numbers and a class of Apéry-like numbers, the numbers of noncrossing connected graphs, the numbers of total edges of all noncrossing connected graphs on n vertices, etc. One of these results verifies a conjecture given by Deutsch and Sagan recently. In the end, we use an automaton to explain the idea of our approach. © 2006 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.