Related papers: Almost-full transversals in equi-$n$-squares

A formal n-square is the set of positions in an square matrix of size n. A shuffle of a formal n-square consists of independent rotations of each row and of each column. A key result turns out to be valid at least for n <= 34 and n = 37:…

A Latin square is an $n$ by $n$ grid filled with $n$ symbols so that each symbol appears exactly once in each row and each column. A transversal in a Latin square is a collection of cells which do not share any row, column, or symbol. This…

This article, showing that almost all objects in the title are asymmetric, is re-typed from a manuscript I wrote somewhere around 1980 (after the papers of Bang and Friedland on the permanent conjecture but before those of Egorychev and…

We introduce consecutive equi-$n$-squares, a variant of equi-$n$-squares in which at least one row or column forms a fixed permutation of $\{1,\dots,n\}$, taken for concreteness to be $(1,\dots,n)$. More generally, the enumeration and…

In 2008, Chen and Chv\'atal conjectured that in every finite metric space of $n$ points, there are at least $n$ distinct lines, or the whole set of points is a line. This is a generalization of a classical result in the Euclidean plane. The…

We prove several results about substructures in Latin squares. First, we explain how to adapt our recent work on high-girth Steiner triple systems to the setting of Latin squares, resolving a conjecture of Linial that there exist Latin…

A multi-latin square of order $n$ and index $k$ is an $n\times n$ array of multisets, each of cardinality $k$, such that each symbol from a fixed set of size $n$ occurs $k$ times in each row and $k$ times in each column. A multi-latin…

Let $T(n)$ denote the maximal number of transversals in an order-$n$ Latin square. Improving on the bounds obtained by McKay et al., Taranenko recently proved that $T(n) \leq \left((1+o(1))\frac{n}{e^2}\right)^{n}$, and conjectured that…

We show that for any n divisible by 3, almost all order-n Steiner triple systems have a perfect matching (also known as a parallel class or resolution class). In fact, we prove a general upper bound on the number of perfect matchings in a…

A Latin square of side n defines in a natural way a finite geometry on 3n points, with three lines of size n and n^2 lines of size 3. A Latin square of side n with a transversal similarly defines a finite geometry on 3n+1 points, with three…

A Latin array is a matrix of symbols in which no symbol occurs more than once within a row or within a column. A diagonal of an $n\times n$ array is a selection of $n$ cells taken from different rows and columns of the array. The weight of…

Monsky proved that a square cannot be dissected into an odd number of triangles of equal area. Stein conjectured that the same holds for any polygon whose edges can be paired into parallel and equal-length segments. We prove Stein's…

Schur's lemma states that every Einstein manifold of dimension $n\geq 3$ has constant scalar curvature. Here $(M,g)$ is defined to be Einstein if its traceless Ricci tensor $$\Rico:=\Ric-\frac{R}{n}g$$ is identically zero. In this short…

While it is a classical result dating back to Dehn (1903) that squares composing a perfect rectangle must have rational side lengths, the arithmetic complexity of these tilings, specifically the growth of the denominators of these rational…

We prove a general result on completing objects similar to Latin rectangles in which the number of occurrences of each symbol is prescribed, each cell contains multiple symbols, and no cell contains repeated symbols. This generalizes…

Let $L$ be an order-$n$ Latin square. For $X, Y, Z \subseteq \{1, ... ,n\}$, let $L(X, Y. Z)$ be the number of triples $i\in X, j\in Y, k\in Z$ such that $L(i,j) = k$. We conjecture that asymptotically almost every Latin square satisfies…

A $k \times n$ partial Latin rectangle is \textit{$C$-sparse} if the number of nonempty entries in each row and column is at most $C$ and each symbol is used at most $C$ times. We prove that the probability a uniformly random $k \times n$…

A set of n non-collinear points in the Euclidean plane defines at least n different lines. Chen and Chv\'tal in 2008 conjectured that the same results is true in metric spaces for an adequate definition of line. More recently, it was…

The Matrix Spencer Conjecture asks whether given $n$ symmetric matrices in $\mathbb{R}^{n \times n}$ with eigenvalues in $[-1,1]$ one can always find signs so that their signed sum has singular values bounded by $O(\sqrt{n})$. The standard…

A classical question in combinatorics is the following: given a partial latin square P, when can we complete P to a latin square L? In this paper, we will investigate the class of \leq\epsilon-dense partial latin squares: partial latin…