Edit: ok, now that I have more than 5 minutes to spare I can clean this up a bit and add a wikipedia reference.
I'm going to write A(n,k) for $A_n(k)$. First of all, note that it's easy to see that A(n,k) = A(n,-k) by induction on n, and that the A(n,k) are zero unless -n <= k <= n. So we may as well just start computing these things (with dynamic programming, for good practice) before we start thinking terribly hard:
Sage code:
values = {}
def A(n,k):
if (n,k) in values:
return values[(n,k)]
if n==0:
if k==0:
result = 1
else:
result = 0
else:
result = (n + 1 - k)**2 * A(n-1, k-1)
result += 2*(n*(n+1)-k**2) * A(n-1, k)
result += (n + 1 + k)**2 * A(n-1, k+1)
values[(n,k)]=result
return result
for n in range(5):
print [A(n,k) for k in range(-n, n+1)]
Output:
[1]
[1, 4, 1]
[1, 26, 66, 26, 1]
[1, 120, 1191, 2416, 1191, 120, 1]
[1, 502, 14608, 88234, 156190, 88234, 14608, 502, 1]
TheseOne glance at the third row will tell any combinatorist that these are famous numbers to combinatorists. It looks like you're getting Eulerian numbers (at least, for odd n, with k shifted). See sequence A008292 at oeis.org. Note that it's easy to see that A Also, wikipedia has a perfectly reasonable page on the Eulerian numbers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eulerian_number. There you can find a recursive formula. I'll use E(n,km) =since A(n is taken already:
$E(n,m) = (n-m)E(n-1,m-1) + (m+1)E(n-1,m)$.
Of course this notation is different than yours; I think your numbers are $E(2n+1, m-n)$,-k) You should be able to see this by induction on napplying the above recursive formula twice and doing the above change of variables to recover your own formula, even if you didn't know thatthough I haven't done it and may have made an error. There's lots of formulas for the Eulerian numbers and there's a lot known about them.