Pattern Avoidance in Set Partitions
A set partition avoids a pattern if no subdivision of that partition standardizes to the pattern. There exists a bijection between set partitions and restricted growth functions (RGFs) on which Wachs and White defined four statistics of interest to this work. We first characterize the restricted growth functions of several avoidance classes based on partitions of size four, enumerate these avoidance classes, and consider the distribution of the Wachs and White statistics across these avoidance classes. We also investigate the equidistribution of statistics between avoidance classes based on multiple patterns.