From Bruhat intervals to intersection lattices and a conjecture of Postnikov

We prove the conjecture of A. Postnikov that (A) the number of regions in the inversion hyperplane arrangement associated with a permutation w ∈ S_n is at most the number of elements below w in the Bruhat order, and (B) that equality holds if and only if w avoids the patterns 4231, 35142, 42513 and 351624. Furthermore, assertion (A) is extended to all finite reflection groups. A byproduct of this result and its proof is a set of inequalities relating Betti numbers of complexified inversion arrangements to Betti numbers of closed Schubert cells. Another consequence is a simple combinatorial interpretation of the chromatic polynomial of the inversion graph of a permutation which avoids the above patterns.