AN ALGEBRAIC INTERPRETATION OF THE SUPER CATALAN NUMBERS

Abstract We extend the notion of polynomial integration over an arbitrary circle C in the Euclidean geometry over general fields $\mathbb {F}$ of characteristic zero as a normalised $\mathbb {F}$ -linear functional on $\mathbb {F}[\alpha _1, \alpha _2]$ that maps polynomials that evaluate to zero on C to zero and is $\mathrm {SO}(2,\mathbb {F})$ -invariant. This allows us to not only build a purely algebraic integration theory in an elementary way, but also give the super Catalan numbers $$ \begin{align*} S(m,n) = \frac{(2m)!(2n)!}{m!n!(m+n)!} \end{align*} $$ an algebraic interpretation in terms of values of this algebraic integral over some circle applied to the monomials $\alpha _1^{2m}\alpha _2^{2n}$ .