组合数学
It is known that any two trees on the same $n$ leaves can be displayed by a network with $n-2$ reticulations, and there are two trees that cannot be displayed by a network with fewer reticulations. But how many reticulations are needed to…
In 1978, Anderson and White asked whether there is a decomposition of $K_{12}$ into two graphs, one planar and one toroidal. Using theoretical arguments and a computer search of all maximal planar graphs of order 12, we show that no such…
Consider a game of permutation wordle in which a player attempts to guess a secret permutation of length $n$ in as few guesses as possible. In each round, the guessing player is told which indices of their guessed permutation are correct.…
There has been significant recent interest in studying how the number of numerical semigroups of genus $g$ behaves as a function of $g$. Bras-Amor\'os has shown how to organize the collection of numerical semigroups of genus $g$ into a…
We investigate a novel setting for polytope rigidity, where a flex must preserve edge lengths and the planarity of faces, but is allowed to change the shapes of faces. For instance, the regular cube is flexible in this notion. We present…
The Explorer-Director game, first introduced by Nedev and Muthukrishnan (2008), simulates a Mobile Agent exploring a ring network with an inconsistent global sense of direction. Two players, the Explorer and the Director, jointly control a…
The paperfolding sequences form an uncountable class of infinite sequences over the alphabet $\{ -1, 1 \}$ that describe the sequence of folds arising from iterated folding of a piece of paper, followed by unfolding. In this note we observe…
In this paper, we introduce the deformed homogeneous polynomials $\mathrm{R}_{n}(x,y;u|q)$. These polynomials generalize some classical polynomials: the Rogers-Szeg\"o polynomials $\mathrm{h}_{n}(x|q)$, the generalized Rogers-Szeg\"o…
Let $\Delta,q\geq 3$ be integers. We prove that there exists $\eta\geq 0.002$ such that if $q\geq (2-\eta)\Delta$, then there exists an open set $\mathcal{U}\subset \mathbb{C}$ that contains the interval $[0,1]$ such that for each $w\in…
There are many similarities between the theories of matroids and $q$-matroids. However, when dealing with the direct sum of $q$-matroids many differences arise. Most notably, it has recently been shown that the direct sum of representable…
A \emph{trace} of a sequence is generated by deleting each bit of the sequence independently with a fixed probability. The well-studied \emph{trace reconstruction} problem asks how many traces are required to reconstruct an unknown binary…
In this paper, we consider induced subgraphs of the Hamming graph $H(n,3)$. We show that if $U \subseteq \mathbb{Z}_3^n$ and $U$ induces a subgraph of $H(n,3)$ with maximum degree at most $1$ then 1. If $U$ is disjoint from a maximum size…
Two $k$-ary Fibonacci recurrences are $a_k(n) = a_k(n-1) + k \cdot a_k(n-2)$ and $b_k(n) = k \cdot b_k(n-1) + b_k(n-2)$. We provide a simple proof that $a_k(n)$ is the number of $k$-regular words over $[n] = \{1,2,\ldots,n\}$ that avoid…
We present a new probabilistic proof of Otter's asymptotic formula for the number of unlabelled trees with a given number of vertices. We additionally prove a new approximation result, showing that the total variation distance between…
A finite group is said to be $n$-cyclic if it contains $n$ cyclic subgroups. For a finite group $G$, the ratio of the number of cyclic subgroups to the number of subgroups is known as the cyclicity degree of the group $G$ and is denoted by…
A balanced generalized de Bruijn sequence with parameters $(n,l,k)$ is a cyclic sequence of $n$ bits such that (a) the number of 0's equals the number of 1's, and (b) each substring of length $l$ occurs at most $k$ times. We determine…
A digraph consisting of a set of vertices $V$ and a set of arcs $E$ is called an interval digraph if there exists a family of closed intervals $\{I_u,J_u\}_{u \in V}$ such that $uv$ is an arc if and only if the intersection of $I_u$ and…
We study a generalization of tropical oriented matroids by Ardila and Develin, and show that they are in bijection with subdivisions of root polytopes, which are sub-polytopes of a product of two simplices.
Two $a{-}b$ paths in a graph $G$ are order-compatible if their common vertices occur in the same order when travelling from $a$ to $b$. Suppose a graph contains an infinite number $\delta$ of edge-disjoint $a{-}b$ paths. G.A. Dirac asked…
The triplication method for constructing strong starters in $Z_{3m}$ from starters in $Z_{m}$ (say, a starter of order 21 from a starter of order 7) was proposed by the authors in 2025. The method reduced construction of the particular…