Related papers: Minimal and maximal Numbrix puzzles

There is a sizable literature on investigating the minimum and maximum numbers of cycles in a class of graphs. However, the answer is known only for special classes. This paper presents a result on the smallest number of cycles in…

Given a finite grid in $\mathbb{R}^2$, how many lines are needed to cover all but one point at least $k$ times? Problems of this nature have been studied for decades, with a general lower bound having been established by Ball and Serra. We…

We give an upper bound on the number of perfect matchings in an undirected simple graph $G$ with an even number of vertices, in terms of the degrees of all the vertices in $G$. This bound is sharp if $G$ is a union of complete bipartite…

The topic of this paper is the Finiteness Conjecture for minimally unsatisfiable clause-sets (MUs), stating that for each fixed deficiency (number of clauses minus number of variables) there are only finitely many patterns, given a certain…

How many copies of a fixed odd cycle, $C_{2m+1}$, can a planar graph contain? We answer this question asymptotically for $m\in\{2,3,4\}$ and prove a bound which is tight up to a factor of $3/2$ for all other values of $m$. This extends the…

Minimal codes are linear codes where all non-zero codewords are minimal, i.e., whose support is not properly contained in the support of another codeword. The minimum possible length of such a $k$-dimensional linear code over $\mathbb{F}_q$…

For nonnegative integers $n_2, n_3$ and $d$, let $N(n_2,n_3,d)$ denote the maximum cardinality of a code of length $n_2+n_3$, with $n_2$ binary coordinates and $n_3$ ternary coordinates (in this order) and with minimum distance at least…

We study the minimum number of maximum matchings in a bipartite multigraph G with parts $X$ and $Y$ under various conditions, refining the well-known lower bound due to M. Hall. When $|X|=n$, every vertex in $X$ has degree at least $k$, and…

We prove an upper bound of $n+9$ for the strong separation number of the complete graph $K_n$, and an upper bound of $n+1$ for its weak separation number. This improves on the previous best known bound of $(1+o(1))n$ for both cases.

Define $||n||$ to be the \emph{complexity} of $n$, which is the smallest number of $1$s needed to write $n$ using an arbitrary combination of addition and multiplication. John Selfridge showed that $||n|| \geq 3\log_3 n$ for all $n$.…

This paper studies a problem of Erd\"{o}s concerning lattice cubes. Given an $N \times N \times N$ lattice cube, we want to find the maximum number of vertices one can select so that no eight corners of a rectangular box are chosen…

Let $K$ be an algebraically closed field and let $M_n(K)$ denote the algebra of $n\times n$ matrices over $K$. A classical problem asks for the minimal possible dimension of a maximal commutative subalgebra $A \subseteq M_n(K)$. We…

The minimum number of clauses in a CNF representation of the parity function $x_1 \oplus x_2 \oplus \dotsb \oplus x_n$ is $2^{n-1}$. One can obtain a more compact CNF encoding by using non-deterministic variables (also known as guess or…

We discuss a problem posed by Ronald Graham about the minimum number, over all 2-colorings of $[1,n]$, of monochromatic $\{x,y,x+ay\}$ triples for $a \geq 1$. We give a new proof of the original case of $a=1$. We show that the minimum…

In this paper, we leverage an information-theoretic upper bound on the maximum admissible level of noise (MALN) in convex Lipschitz-continuous zeroth-order optimisation to establish corresponding upper bounds for classes of strongly convex…

We investigate the problem of the maximum number of cubic subwords (of the form $www$) in a given word. We also consider square subwords (of the form $ww$). The problem of the maximum number of squares in a word is not well understood.…

We determine a lower bound for the number of edges of a 2-connected maximal nontraceable graph, and present a construction of an infinite family of maximal nontraceable graphs that realize this bound.

We show that every cubic bridgeless graph with n vertices has at least 3n/4-10 perfect matchings. This is the first bound that differs by more than a constant from the maximal dimension of the perfect matching polytope.

Let m be a positive integer and let G be a cubic graph of order 2n. We consider the problem of covering the edge-set of G with the minimum number of matchings of size m. This number is called excessive [m]-index of G in literature. The case…

Consider a well-shuffled deck of cards of $n$ different types where each type occurs $m$ times. In a complete feedback game, a player is asked to guess the top card from the deck. After each guess, the top card is revealed to the player and…