Related papers: The m\'enage problem with a known mathematician
We present an alternative proof to the Touchard-Kaplansky formula for the probl\`eme des m\'enages, which, we believe, is simpler than the extant ones and is in the spirit of the elegant original proof by Kaplansky (1943). About the latter…
In this paper we study the problem of the Malicious Maitre d', as described in Peter Winkler's book Mathematical Puzzles: A Connoisseur's Collection. This problem, attributed to computer scientist Rob Pike, involves seating diners around a…
The stable marriage problem has been introduced in order to describe a complex system where individuals attempt to optimise their own satisfaction, subject to mutually conflicting constraints. Due to the potential large applicability of…
We present a generalization of the marriage problem underlying Hall's famous Marriage Theorem to what we call the Symmetric Marriage Problem, a problem that can be thought of as a special case of Maximal Weighted Bipartite Matching. We show…
We study popular matchings in three classical settings: the house allocation problem, the marriage problem, and the roommates problem. In the popular matching problem, (a subset of) the vertices in a graph have preference orderings over…
In the classical probability model, let $f(n)$ be the maximum number of pairwise independent events for the sample space with $n$ sample points. The determination of $f(n)$ is equivalent to the problem of determining the maximum cardinality…
The classical stable marriage problem asks for a matching between a set of men and a set of women with no blocking pairs, which are pairs formed by a man and a woman who would both prefer switching from their current status to be paired up…
This document is built around a list of thirty-two problems in enumeration of matchings, the first twenty of which were presented in a lecture at MSRI in the fall of 1996. I begin with a capsule history of the topic of enumeration of…
In the stable marriage and roommates problems, a set of agents is given, each of them having a strictly ordered preference list over some or all of the other agents. A matching is a set of disjoint pairs of mutually accepted agents. If any…
The reader is reminded of several puzzles involving randomness. These may be ill-posed, and if well-posed there is sometimes a solution that uses probabilistic intuition in a special way. Various examples are presented including the well…
We provide a problem definition of the stable marriage problem for a general number of parties $p$ under a natural preference scheme in which each person has simple lists for the other parties. We extend the notion of stability in a natural…
The popular matching problem is of matching a set of applicants to a set of posts, where each applicant has a preference list, ranking a non-empty subset of posts in the order of preference, possibly with ties. A matching M is popular if…
Consider the group of $n$ men and $n$ women, each with their own preference list for a potential marriage partner. The stable marriage is a bipartite matching such that no unmatched pair (man, woman) prefer each other to their partners in…
This letter presents the solution to a counting problem, to the best of our knowledge not known in full generality, which can be mapped to both (i) ways to lace a $N$-holes-per-side shoe with $\ell$ shoestrings and (ii) a sum over the…
Mathematics has been used in the exploration and enumeration of juggling patterns. In the case when we catch and throw one ball at a time the number of possible juggling patterns is well-known. When we are allowed to catch and throw any…
We measure whether there are numerous pairs of twin primes (hereafter referred to as twin prime pairs) according to the prime number inferred by sieve of Eratosthenes. In this study, we reveal at least three additional twin prime pairs…
We determine, within 1, the value of N for which sum (s1 choose i)(s2 choose N)(s1 choose N-i)(N choose i) achieves its maximum value. Here s1 and s2 are fixed integers. This problem arises in studying the most likely value for the size of…
In this paper, we discuss a stochastic decision problem of optimally selecting the order in which to try $n$ opportunities that may yield an uncertain reward in the future. The motivation came out from pure curiosity, after an informal…
Let $G = (A \cup B,E)$ be a bipartite graph where the set $A$ consists of agents or main players and the set $B$ consists of jobs or secondary players. Every vertex has a strict ranking of its neighbors. A matching $M$ is popular if for any…
The stable marriage (SM) problem has a wide variety of practical applications, ranging from matching resident doctors to hospitals, to matching students to schools, or more generally to any two-sided market. In the classical formulation, n…