Parity of transversals of Latin squares

Best, Darcy; Wanless, Ian M.

doi:10.5802/alco.103

Best, Darcy; Wanless, Ian M.

Algebraic Combinatorics, Volume 3 (2020) no. 2, pp. 539-557.

Abstract

We introduce a notion of parity for transversals, and use it to show that in Latin squares of order $2 mod 4$ , the number of transversals is a multiple of 4. We also demonstrate a number of relationships (mostly congruences modulo 4) involving $E_{1}, \dots, E_{n}$ , where $E_{i}$ is the number of diagonals of a given Latin square that contain exactly $i$ different symbols.

Let $A (i ∣ j)$ denote the matrix obtained by deleting row $i$ and column $j$ from a parent matrix $A$ . Define $t_{i j}$ to be the number of transversals in $L (i ∣ j)$ , for some fixed Latin square $L$ . We show that $t_{a b} \equiv t_{c d} mod 2$ for all $a, b, c, d$ and $L$ . Also, if $L$ has odd order then the number of transversals of $L$ equals $t_{a b}$ mod 2. We conjecture that $t_{a c} + t_{b c} + t_{a d} + t_{b d} \equiv 0 mod 4$ for all $a, b, c, d$ .

In the course of our investigations we prove several results that could be of interest in other contexts. For example, we show that the number of perfect matchings in a $k$ -regular bipartite graph on $2 n$ vertices is divisible by $4$ when $n$ is odd and $k \equiv 0 mod 4$ . We also show that

per A (a ∣ c) + per A (b ∣ c) + per A (a ∣ d) + per A (b ∣ d) \equiv 0 mod 4

for all $a, b, c, d$ , when $A$ is an integer matrix of odd order with all row and columns sums equal to $k \equiv 2 mod 4$ .

Received: 2019-02-23
Revised: 2019-07-10
Accepted: 2019-11-25
Published online: 2020-04-01

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5802/alco.103
Classification: 05B15, 15A15, 05C70
Keywords: parity, Latin square, transversal, permanent, Latin rectangle, perfect matching, permanental minor, bipartite graph

@article{ALCO_2020__3_2_539_0,
     author = {Best, Darcy and Wanless, Ian M.},
     title = {Parity of transversals of {Latin} squares},
     journal = {Algebraic Combinatorics},
     pages = {539--557},
     publisher = {MathOA foundation},
     volume = {3},
     number = {2},
     year = {2020},
     doi = {10.5802/alco.103},
     language = {en},
     url = {https://alco.centre-mersenne.org/articles/10.5802/alco.103/}
}

Best, Darcy; Wanless, Ian M. Parity of transversals of Latin squares. Algebraic Combinatorics, Volume 3 (2020) no. 2, pp. 539-557. doi : 10.5802/alco.103. https://alco.centre-mersenne.org/articles/10.5802/alco.103/

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