Related papers: The $n$-queens problem
The Rubik's Cube is perhaps the world's most famous and iconic puzzle, well-known to have a rich underlying mathematical structure (group theory). In this paper, we show that the Rubik's Cube also has a rich underlying algorithmic…
Consider a $2\times n$ rectangular grid composed of $1\times 1$ squares. Cutting only along the edges between squares, how many ways are there to divide the board into $k$ pieces? Building off the work of Durham and Richmond, who found the…
We examine the number T of queries that a quantum network requires to compute several Boolean functions on {0,1}^N in the black-box model. We show that, in the black-box model, the exponential quantum speed-up obtained for partial functions…
Clique counts reveal important properties about the structure of massive graphs, especially social networks. The simple setting of just 3-cliques (triangles) has received much attention from the research community. For larger cliques (even,…
We consider the problem of enumerating integer tetrahedra of fixed perimeter (sum of side-lengths) and/or diameter (maximum side-length), up to congruence. As we will see, this problem is considerably more difficult than the corresponding…
We introduce a class of plane graphs called weak near-triangulations, and prove that this class is closed under certain graph operations. Then we use the properties of weak near-triangulations to prove that every plane triangulation on…
We consider the allocation of $m$ balls into $n$ bins with incomplete information. In the classical Two-Choice process a ball first queries the load of two randomly chosen bins and is then placed in the least loaded bin. In our setting,…
The investigation of conditions guaranteeing the appearance of cycles of certain lengths is one of the most well-studied topics in graph theory. In this paper we consider a problem of this type which asks, for fixed integers ${\ell}$ and…
We establish that almost every positive integer $n$ is the sum of four cubes, two of which are at most $n^{\theta}$, as long as $\theta\geq192/869$. An asymptotic formula for the number of such representations is established when…
In this paper, we perform a minimalistic quantization of the classical game of tic-tac-toe, by allowing superpositions of classical moves. In order for the quantum game to reduce properly to the classical game, we require legal quantum…
We show that the number of linear spaces on a set of $n$ points and the number of rank-3 matroids on a ground set of size $n$ are both of the form $(cn+o(n))^{n^2/6}$, where $c=e^{\sqrt 3/2-3}(1+\sqrt 3)/2$. This is the final piece of the…
The Tur\'an number $\ex(n,H)$ is the maximum number of edges that an $n$-vertex $H$-free graph can have. The suspension $\widehat{H}$ is obtained from $H$ by adding a new vertex which is adjacent to all vertices of $H$ and a tree is…
We consider the problem of inserting one item into a list of N-1 ordered items. We previously showed that no quantum algorithm could solve this problem in fewer than log N/(2 log log N) queries, for N large. We transform the problem into a…
Over a decade after its proposal, the idea of using quantum computers to sample hard distributions has remained a key path to demonstrating quantum advantage. Yet a severe drawback remains: verification seems to require classical…
We make an analytical proof for Lehmer's totient conjecture. Lehmer conjectured that there is no solution for the congruence equation $n-1\equiv 0~(mod~\phi(n))$ with composite integers,$n$, where $\phi(n)$ denotes Euler's totient function.…
In 1960 R\'enyi in his Michigan State University lectures asked for the number of random queries necessary to recover a hidden bijective labeling of $n$ distinct objects. In each query one selects a random subset of labels and asks, which…
The main purpose of this paper is to provide an infinite family of counter examples of the open problem mentioned in [2]. In particular, we present an infinite family of a particular Legendrian $(4,-(2n+5))$-torus knot, for each $n \geq 0$,…
(Below, \Box means "perfect square") Let $P$ and $Q$ be non-zero integers. The Lucas sequence $\{U_n(P,Q)\}$ is defined by $U_0=0$, $U_1=1$, $U_n=P U_{n-1}-Q U_{n-2}$, $(n \geq 2)$. Historically, there has been much interest in when the…
We study a Tur\'an-type problem on edge-colored complete graphs. We show that for any $r$ and $t$, any sufficiently large $r$-edge-colored complete graph on $n$ vertices with $\Omega(n^{2-1/tr^r})$ edges in each color contains a member from…
We study $N$-congruences between quadratic twists of elliptic curves. If $N$ has exactly two distinct prime factors we show that these are parametrised by double covers of certain modular curves. In many, but not all cases, the modular…