English

Magic squares with all subsquares of possible orders based on extended Langford sequences

Combinatorics 2017-12-18 v1

Abstract

A magic square of order nn with all subsquares of possible orders (ASMS(n)(n)) is a magic square which contains a general magic square of each order k{3,4,,n2}k\in\{3, 4, \cdots, n-2\}. Since the conjecture on the existence of an ASMS was proposed in 1994, much attention has been paid but very little is known except for few sporadic examples. A kk-extended Langford sequence of defect dd and length mm is equivalent to a partition of {1,2,,2m+1}\{k}\{1,2,\cdots,2m+1\}\backslash\{k\} into differences {d,,d+m1}\{d,\cdots,d+m-1\}. In this paper, a construction of ASMS based on extended Langford sequence is established. As a result, it is shown that there exists an ASMS(n)(n) for n±3(mod18)n\equiv\pm3\pmod{18}, which gives a partial answer to Abe's conjecture on ASMS.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1712.05560,
  title  = {Magic squares with all subsquares of possible orders based on extended Langford sequences},
  author = {Wen Li and Ming Zhong and Yong Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.05560},
  year   = {2017}
}