Maps in Locally Orientable Surfaces, the Double Coset Algebra, and Zonal Polynomials

The genus series is the generating series for the number of maps (in- equivalent two-cell embeddings of graphs), in locally orientable surfaces, closed and without boundary, with respect to vertex- and face-degrees, number of edges and genus. A hypermap is a face two-colourable map. An expression for the genus series for (rooted) hypermaps is derived in terms of zonal polynomials by using a double coset algebra in conjunction with an encoding of a map as a triple of matchings. The expression is analogous to the one obtained for orientable surfaces in terms of Schur functions.