The number of natural descents of a standard Young tableau. A natural descent of a standard tableau $T$ is an entry $i$ such that $i+1$ appears in a higher row than $i$ in English notation.

The number of descents of a standard tableau. Entry $i$ of a standard Young tableau is a descent if $i+1$ appears in a row below the row of $i$.

The staircase size of the code of a permutation. The code $c(\pi)$ of a permutation $\pi$ of length $n$ is given by the sequence $(c_1,\ldots,c_{n})$ with $c_i = |\{j > i : \pi(j) < \pi(i)\}|$. This is a bijection between permutations and all sequences $(c_1,\ldots,c_n)$ with $0 \leq c_i \leq n-i$. The staircase size of the code is the maximal $k$ such that there exists a subsequence $(c_{i_k},\ldots,c_{i_1})$ of $c(\pi)$ with $c_{i_j} \geq j$. This statistic is mapped through [[Mp00062]] to the number of descents, showing that together with the number of inversions [[St000018]] it is Euler-Mahonian.

The number of descents of a set partition. The Mahonian representation of a set partition $\{B_1,\dots,B_k\}$ of $\{1,\dots,n\}$ is the restricted growth word $w_1\dots w_n\}$ obtained by sorting the blocks of the set partition according to their maximal element, and setting $w_i$ to the index of the block containing $i$. The word $w$ has a descent at position $i$ if $w_i > w_{i+1}$.

The number of recoils of a permutation. A '''recoil''', or '''inverse descent''' of a permutation $\pi$ is a value $i$ such that $i+1$ appears to the left of $i$ in $\pi_1,\pi_2,\dots,\pi_n$. In other words, this is the number of descents of the inverse permutation. It can be also be described as the number of occurrences of the mesh pattern $([2,1], {(0,1),(1,1),(2,1)})$, i.e., the middle row is shaded.

The number of runs in a permutation. A run in a permutation is an inclusion-wise maximal increasing substring, i.e., a contiguous subsequence. This is the same as the number of descents plus 1.