We introduce a new family of hyperplane arrangements inspired by the homogenized Linial arrangement (which was recently introduced by Hetyei), and show that the intersection lattices of these arrangements are isomorphic to the bond lattices of Ferrers graphs. Using recent work of Lazar and Wachs we are able to give combinatorial interpretations of the characteristic polynomials of these arrangements in terms of permutation enumeration. For certain infinite families of these hyperplane arrangements, we are able to give generating function formulas for their characteristic polynomials. To do so, we develop a generalization of Dumont’s surjective staircases, and introduce a polynomial which enumerates these generalized surjective staircases according to several statistics. We prove a recurrence for these polynomials and show that in certain special cases this recurrence can be solved explicitly to yield a generating function. We also prove refined versions of several of these results using the theory of complex hyperplane arrangements. 

If a pure simplicial complex is partitionable, then its h-vector has a combinatorial interpretation in terms of any partitioning of the complex. Given a non-partitionable complex increment , we construct a complex Gamma superset of increment of the same dimension such that both Gamma and the relative complex (Gamma , increment ) are partitionable. This allows us to rewrite the h-vector of any pure simplicial complex as the difference of two h-vectors of partitionable complexes, giving an analogous interpretation of the h-vector of a non-partitionable complex. By contrast, for a given complex increment it is not always possible to find a complex Gamma such that both Gamma and (Gamma , increment ) are Cohen- Macaulay. We characterize when this is possible, and we show that the construction of such a Gamma in this case is remarkably straightforward. We end with a note on a similar notion for shellability and a connection to Simon's conjecture on extendable shellability for uniform matroids.

We study the intersection lattice of a hyperplane arrangement recently introduced by Hetyei who showed that the number of regions of the arrangement is a median Genocchi number. Using a different method, we refine Hetyei’s result by providing a combinatorial interpretation of the coefficients of the characteristic polynomial of the intersection lattice of this arrangement. The Genocchi numbers count a class of permutations known as Dumont permutations and the median Genocchi numbers count the derangements in this class. We show that the signless coefficients of the characteristic polynomial count Dumont-like permutations with a given number of cycles. This enables us to derive formulas for the generating function of the characteristic polynomial, which reduce to known formulas for the generating functions of the Genocchi numbers and the median Genocchi numbers. As a byproduct of our work, we obtain new models for the Genocchi and median Genocchi numbers.