Almost-full transversals in equi-$n$-squares

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Chakraborti, Debsoumya, Christoph, Micha, Hunter, Zach, Montgomery, Richard, Petrov, Teo
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866909423629238272
author Chakraborti, Debsoumya
Christoph, Micha
Hunter, Zach
Montgomery, Richard
Petrov, Teo
author_facet Chakraborti, Debsoumya
Christoph, Micha
Hunter, Zach
Montgomery, Richard
Petrov, Teo
contents In 1975, Stein made a wide generalisation of the Ryser-Brualdi-Stein conjecture on transversals in Latin squares, conjecturing that every equi-$n$-square (an $n\times n$ array filled with $n$ symbols where each symbol appears exactly $n$ times) has a transversal of size $n-1$. That is, it should have a collection of $n-1$ entries that share no row, column, or symbol. In 2017, Aharoni, Berger, Kotlar, and Ziv showed that equi-$n$-squares always have a transversal with size at least $2n/3$. In 2019, Pokrovskiy and Sudakov disproved Stein's conjecture by constructing equi-$n$-squares without a transversal of size $n-\frac{\log n}{42}$, but asked whether Stein's conjecture is approximately true. I.e., does an equi-$n$-square always have a transversal with size $(1-o(1))n$? We answer this question in the positive. More specifically, we improve both known bounds, showing that there exist equi-$n$-squares with no transversal of size $n-Ω(\sqrt{n})$ and that every equi-$n$-square contains $n-n^{1-Ω(1)}$ disjoint transversals of size $n-n^{1-Ω(1)}$.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_07733
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Almost-full transversals in equi-$n$-squares
Chakraborti, Debsoumya
Christoph, Micha
Hunter, Zach
Montgomery, Richard
Petrov, Teo
Combinatorics
In 1975, Stein made a wide generalisation of the Ryser-Brualdi-Stein conjecture on transversals in Latin squares, conjecturing that every equi-$n$-square (an $n\times n$ array filled with $n$ symbols where each symbol appears exactly $n$ times) has a transversal of size $n-1$. That is, it should have a collection of $n-1$ entries that share no row, column, or symbol. In 2017, Aharoni, Berger, Kotlar, and Ziv showed that equi-$n$-squares always have a transversal with size at least $2n/3$. In 2019, Pokrovskiy and Sudakov disproved Stein's conjecture by constructing equi-$n$-squares without a transversal of size $n-\frac{\log n}{42}$, but asked whether Stein's conjecture is approximately true. I.e., does an equi-$n$-square always have a transversal with size $(1-o(1))n$? We answer this question in the positive. More specifically, we improve both known bounds, showing that there exist equi-$n$-squares with no transversal of size $n-Ω(\sqrt{n})$ and that every equi-$n$-square contains $n-n^{1-Ω(1)}$ disjoint transversals of size $n-n^{1-Ω(1)}$.
title Almost-full transversals in equi-$n$-squares
topic Combinatorics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.07733