English

The Davenport constant of a box

Combinatorics 2016-09-06 v2 Number Theory

Abstract

Given an additively written abelian group GG and a set XGX\subseteq G, we let B(X)\mathscr{B}(X) denote the monoid of zero-sum sequences over XX and D(X)\mathsf{D}(X) the Davenport constant of B(X)\mathscr{B}(X), namely the supremum of the positive integers nn for which there exists a sequence x1xnx_1 \cdots x_n of B(X)\mathscr{B}(X) such that iIxi0\sum_{i \in I} x_i \ne 0 for each non-empty proper subset II of {1,,n}\{1, \ldots, n\}. In this paper, we mainly investigate the case when GG is a power of Z\mathbb{Z} and XX is a box (i.e., a product of intervals of GG). Some mixed sets (e.g., the product of a group by a box) are studied too, and some inverse results are obtained.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1405.4363,
  title  = {The Davenport constant of a box},
  author = {Alain Plagne and Salvatore Tringali},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1405.4363},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

23 pages, no figures; fixed minor mistakes; added a new reference