A mathematical characterization of serially-pruned permutations (SPPs) employed in variable-length permuters and their associated fast pruning algorithms and architectures are proposed. Permuters are used in many signal processing systems for shuffling data and in communication systems as an adjunct to coding for error correction. Typically only a small set of discrete permuter lengths are supported. Serial pruning is a simple technique to alter the length of a permutation to support a wider range of lengths, but results in a serial processing bottleneck. In this paper, parallelizing SPPs is formulated in terms of recursively computing sums involving integer floor and related functions using integer operations, in a fashion analogous to evaluating Dedekind sums. A mathematical treatment for bit-reversal permutations (BRPs) is presented, and closed-form expressions for BRP statistics are derived. It is shown that BRP sequences have weak correlation properties. A new statistic called permutation inliers that characterizes the pruning gap of pruned interleavers is proposed. Using this statistic, a recursive algorithm that computes the minimum inliers count of a pruned BR interleaver (PBRI) in logarithmic time complexity is presented. This algorithm enables parallelizing a serial PBRI algorithm by any desired parallelism factor by computing the pruning gap in lookahead rather than a serial fashion, resulting in significant reduction in interleaving latency and memory overhead. Extensions to 2-D block and stream interleavers, as well as applications to pruned fast Fourier transforms and LTE turbo interleavers, are also presented. Moreover, hardware-efficient architectures for the proposed algorithms are developed. Simulation results demonstrate 3 to 4 orders of magnitude improvement in interleaving time compared to existing approaches.