English

On Kahn's basis conjecture

Combinatorics 2018-10-18 v1

Abstract

In 1991, Kahn made the following conjecture. For any nn-dimensional vector space VV and any n×nn\times n array of n2n^2 bases of VV, it is possible to choose a representative vector from each of these bases in such a way that the representatives from each row form a basis and the representatives from each column also form a basis. Rota's basis conjecture can be viewed as a special case of Kahn's conjecture, where for each column, all the bases in that column are the same. Recently the authors showed that in the setting of Rota's basis conjecture it is possible to find suitable representatives in (1/2o(1))n\left(1/2-o\left(1\right)\right)n of the rows. In this companion note we give a slight modification of our arguments which generalises this result to the setting of Kahn's conjecture. Our results also apply to the more general setting of matroids.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1810.07464,
  title  = {On Kahn's basis conjecture},
  author = {Matija Bucić and Matthew Kwan and Alexey Pokrovskiy and Benny Sudakov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.07464},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

7 pages, companion note to the paper "Halfway to Rota's basis conjecture" [arXiv:1810.07462]

R2 v1 2026-06-23T04:42:56.817Z