A visual proof of a result of Knuth on spanning trees of Aztec diamonds in the case of odd order

摘要

The even Aztec diamond ADn is known to have precisely four times more spanning trees than the odd Aztec diamond ODn—this was conjectured by Stanley and first proved by Knuth. We present a short combinatorial proof of this fact in the case of odd n. Our proof works also for the more general case of odd-by-odd Aztec rectangles.