English

A linear bound on the Manickam-Miklos-Singhi Conjecture

Combinatorics 2013-08-12 v1 Number Theory

Abstract

Suppose that we have a set of numbers x_1, ..., x_n which have nonnegative sum. How many subsets of k numbers from {x_1, ..., x_n} must have nonnegative sum? Manickam, Miklos, and Singhi conjectured that for n at least 4k the answer is (n-1 \choose k-1). This conjecture is known to hold when n is large compared to k. The best known bounds are due to Alon, Huang, and Sudakov who proved the conjecture when n > 33k^2. In this paper we improve this bound by showing that there is a constant C such that the conjecture holds when n > Ck.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1308.2176,
  title  = {A linear bound on the Manickam-Miklos-Singhi Conjecture},
  author = {Alexey Pokrovskiy},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1308.2176},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

25 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T01:07:07.104Z