3 research outputs found
Kemnitz’ conjecture revisited
AbstractA conjecture of Kemnitz remained open for some 20 years: each sequence of 4n-3 lattice points in the plane has a subsequence of length n whose centroid is a lattice point. It was solved independently by Reiher and di Fiore in the autumn of 2003. A refined and more general version of Kemnitz’ conjecture is proved in this note. The main result is about sequences of lengths between 3p-2 and 4p-3 in the additive group of integer pairs modulo p, for the essential case of an odd prime p. We derive structural information related to their zero sums, implying a variant of the original conjecture for each of the lengths mentioned. The approach is combinatorial
Zero-sum problems for abelian p-groups and covers of the integers by residue classes
Zero-sum problems for abelian groups and covers of the integers by residue
classes, are two different active topics initiated by P. Erdos more than 40
years ago and investigated by many researchers separately since then. In an
earlier announcement [Electron. Res. Announc. Amer. Math. Soc. 9(2003), 51-60],
the author claimed some surprising connections among these seemingly unrelated
fascinating areas. In this paper we establish further connections between
zero-sum problems for abelian p-groups and covers of the integers. For example,
we extend the famous Erdos-Ginzburg-Ziv theorem in the following way: If
{a_s(mod n_s)}_{s=1}^k covers each integer either exactly 2q-1 times or exactly
2q times where q is a prime power, then for any c_1,...,c_k in Z/qZ there
exists a subset I of {1,...,k} such that sum_{s in I}1/n_s=q and sum_{s in
I}c_s=0. Our main theorem in this paper unifies many results in the two realms
and also implies an extension of the Alon-Friedland-Kalai result on regular
subgraphs