English

On a question of Erd\H{o}s on doubly stochastic matrices

Metric Geometry 2023-06-12 v1 Probability

Abstract

In a celebrated paper of Marcus and Ree (1959), it was shown that if A=[aij]A=[a_{ij}] is an n×nn \times n doubly stochastic matrix, then there is a permutation σSn\sigma \in S_n such that i,j=1nai,j2i=1nai,σ(i)\sum_{i,j=1}^{n} a_{i,j}^{2} \leq \sum_{i=1}^{n} a_{i,\sigma(i)}. Erd\H{o}s asked for which doubly stochastic matrices the inequality is saturated. Although Marcus and Ree provided some insight for the set of solutions, the question appears to have fallen into oblivion. Our goal is to provide a complete answer in the particular, yet non-trivial, case when n=3n=3.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2306.05518,
  title  = {On a question of Erd\H{o}s on doubly stochastic matrices},
  author = {Ludovick Bouthat and Javad Mashreghi and Frédéric Morneau-Guérin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.05518},
  year   = {2023}
}