组合数学

We construct a skew-Hadamard matrix of order 1252 = 2(5^4 + 1) using a bordered skew-Hadamard difference family over GF(5^4), with blocks given as unions of cyclotomic classes of order N = 16. This order has been reported as missing in some…

We consider the enumeration of plane trees (rooted ordered trees) whose vertices are colored according to a specific coloring rule that prescribes which possible pairs of colors can occur as the colors of a parent vertex and its child. This…

Power domination is a graph-theoretic model for the observance of a power grid using phasor measurement units (PMUs). There are many costs associated with the installation of a PMU, but also costs associated with not observing the entire…

We study the probabilistic existence of point configurations satisfying the $(0, m, d)$-net property in base $b$ within a randomly generated point set of size $N$ in the $d$-dimensional unit cube. We first derive an upper bound on the…

For fixed positive integers $n,m$, let $\mathrm{Mat}_{n\times m}(\mathbb{C})$ be the affine space consisting of all $n\times m$ complex matrices, and let $\mathbb{C}[\mathbf{x}_{n\times m}]$ be its coordinate ring. For $0\le…

In 1934 L. R\'edei published his famous theorem that the number of Hamiltonian paths in a tournament is odd. In fact it is a corollary of a stronger theorem in his paper. Stronger theorems were also obtained in the early 1970s by G.A. Dirac…

BCube, as a popular server-centric data center network (DCN), offers significant advantages in low latency, load balancing, and high bandwidth. The many-to-many paired $m$-disjoint path cover ($m$-DPC), a generalization of Hamiltonian…

In 1980, Thomassen stated his weak linkage conjecture: for an odd positive integer k, if a graph G is k-edge-connected, then, for any collection of k pairs of vertices {s_1,t_1}, ..., {s_k,t_k} in G, not necessarily distinct, there are…

We show by an explicit example that the Garsia--Remmel $q$-rook numbers of Ferrers boards do not all have unimodal sequences of coefficients. This resolves in the negative a question from 1986 by the aforementioned authors.

Using drones to perform human-related tasks can play a key role in various fields, such as defense, disaster response, agriculture, healthcare, and many others. The drone delivery packing problem (DDPP) arises in the context of logistics in…

The reconfiguration graph of the $k$-colorings of a graph $G$, denoted $R_{k}(G)$, is the graph whose vertices are the $k$-colorings of $G$ and two colorings are adjacent in $R_{k}(G)$ if they differ in color on exactly one vertex. A graph…

We say that an edge-coloring of a graph $G$ is proper if every pair of incident edges receive distinct colors, and is rainbow if no two edges of $G$ receive the same color. Furthermore, given a fixed graph $F$, we say that $G$ is rainbow…

This paper studies irreducible characters of the $q$-rook monoid algebra $R_n(q)$ using the vertex algebraic method. Based on the Frobenius formula for $R_n(q)$, a new iterative character formula is derived with the help of the vertex…

We find an explicit $S_n$-equivariant bijection between the integral points in a certain zonotope in $\mathbb{R}^n$, combinatorially equivalent to the permutahedron, and the set of $m$-parking functions of length $n$. This bijection…

Let $\Lambda(T)$ denote the set of leaves in a tree $T$. One natural problem is to look for a spanning tree $T$ of a given graph $G$ such that $\Lambda(T)$ is as large as possible. This problem is called maximum leaf number, and it is a…

The Directed Grid Theorem, stating that there is a function $f$ such that a directed graphs of directed treewidth at least $f(k)$ contains a directed grid of size at least $k$ as a butterfly minor, after being a conjecture for nearly 20…

Graham conjectured in 1971 that for any prime $p$, any subset $S\subseteq \mathbb{Z}_p\setminus \{0\}$ admits an ordering $s_1,s_2,\dots,s_{|S|}$ where all partial sums $s_1, s_1+s_2,\dots,s_1+s_2+\dots+s_{|S|}$ are distinct. We prove this…

The alternating (zigzag) numbers $A_n$, counting the ascending alternating permutations of $\left\{1,\cdots,n\right\}$ and defined by the exponential generating function $\tan x+\sec x$, admit several classical combinatorial and analytic…

We prove that the pigeonhole upper bound $\lambda(s,m) \leq \binom{m}{2}(s+1)$ is asymptotically tight whenever $s/\!\sqrt{m} \to \infty$. In particular, $\lambda(s,m) \sim \binom{m}{2}\,s$ in this regime. As corollaries: $\lambda(n,n)/n^3…

In [GL24], Galashin and Lam discovered that when $k$ and $n$ are coprime, the proportion of subspaces in $\mathrm{Gr}(k,n)(\mathbb{F}_q)$ that lie in the top-dimensional open positroid variety $\Pi_{k,n}^\circ(\mathbb{F}_q)$ is…