Stanley's Zrank Problem on Skew Partitions

We present an affirmative answer to Stanley’s zrank problem, namely, the zrank and rank are equal for any skew partition. We show that certain classes of restricted Cauchy matrices are nonsingular and furthermore, the signs depend on the number of zero entries. Similar to notion of the jrank of a skew partition, we give a characterization of the rank in terms of the Giambelli type matrices of the corresponding skew Schur functions. We also show that the sign of the determinant of a factorial Cauchy matrix is uniquely determined by the number of its zero entries, which implies the nonsingularity of the inverse binomial coefficient matrix.