The disjoint-transversal conjecture for row-Latin rectangles

About 28 years old · traced to

Let AA be an m×nm\times n row-Latin rectangle based on kk. A transversal selects one entry from each column, with all selected entries distinct, and pairwise disjoint transversals share no entries.

Disjoint-transversal conjecture. If m≥2n−1m\ge2n-1, then AA has m−(n−1)m-(n-1) pairwise disjoint transversals.

This generalizes the observed behavior of the matrices Rm,nR_{m,n}, for which the bound is attained. The claim is presented as an open problem for general row-Latin rectangles.

References

Primary source

Glenn G. Chappell, “A Matroid Generalization of a Result on Row-Latin Rectangles”, arXiv:math/9807036 (1998).

Progress summary

Never refreshed

Nothing recorded yet. Refresh searches the literature and the public web for attempts on this problem, and writes the first summary here.

Solutions 0

No solutions have been posted yet.