English

The Davenport constant of balls and boxes

Number Theory 2025-10-24 v1 Combinatorics

Abstract

Given an additively written abelian group GG and a set XGX\subseteq G, we let D(X)\mathsf{D}(X) denote the Davenport constant of XX, namely the largest non-negative integer nn for which there exists a sequence x1,,xnx_1, \dots, x_n of elements of XX such that i=1nxi=0\sum_{i=1}^n x_i =0 and 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 Z2\mathbb{Z}^2 and Z3\mathbb{Z}^3, and XX is a discrete Euclidean ball. An application to the classical problem of estimating the Davenport constant of a box - a product of intervals of integers - is then obtained.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.20412,
  title  = {The Davenport constant of balls and boxes},
  author = {Benjamin Girard and Alain Plagne},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.20412},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

43 pages, 4 figures