Counting linear congruence systems with a fixed number of solutions
Abstract
For a prime and a positive integer consider a homogeneous linear system over the ring (the ring of integers modulo ) described by an -matrix. The possible number of solutions to such a system is , where . We study the problem of how many -matrices over there are given that we have exactly homogeneous solutions. For the case (when is a field) George von Landsberg proved a general formula in 1893. However, there seems to be few published general results for the case except when we have a unique solution (). In this article we present recursive methods for counting such matrices and present explicit formulas for the case when and . We will use a generalization of Euler's -function and Gaussian binomial coefficients to express our formulas. As an application we compute the probability that gcd gives the number of solutions to the quadratic system in .
Cite
@article{arxiv.2507.04688,
title = {Counting linear congruence systems with a fixed number of solutions},
author = {Marcus Nilsson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.04688},
year = {2025}
}