Maximal partial Latin cubes

We prove that each maximal partial Latin cube must have more than 29.289% of its cells filled and show by construction that this is a nearly tight bound. We also prove upper and lower bounds on the number of cells containing a fixed symbol in maximal partial Latin cubes and hypercubes, and we use these bounds to determine for small orders n the numbers k for which there exists a maximal partial Latin cube of order n with exactly k entries. Finally, we prove that maximal partial Latin cubes of order n exist of each size from approximately half-full (n3/2 for even n ≥ 10 and (n3 + n)/2 for odd n ≥21) to completely full, except for when either precisely 1 or 2 cells are empty

Ryser Type Conditions for Extending Colorings of Triples

In 1951, Ryser showed that an $n\times n$ array $L$ whose top left $r\times s$ subarray is filled with $n$ different symbols, each occurring at most once in each row and at most once in each column, can be completed to a latin square of order $n$ if and only if the number of occurrences of each symbol in $L$ is at least $r+s-n$. We prove a Ryser type result on extending partial coloring of 3-uniform hypergraphs. Let $X,Y$ be finite sets with $X\subsetneq Y$ and $|Y|\equiv 0 \pmod 3$. When can we extend a (proper) coloring of $\lambda \binom{X}{3}$ (all triples on a ground set $X$, each one being repeated $\lambda$ times) to a coloring of $\lambda \binom{Y}{3}$ using the fewest possible number of colors? It is necessary that the number of triples of each color in $\binom{X}{3}$ is at least $|X|-2|Y|/3$. Using hypergraph detachments (Combin. Probab. Comput. 21 (2012), 483--495), we establish a necessary and sufficient condition in terms of list coloring complete multigraphs. Using H\"aggkvist-Janssen's bound (Combin. Probab. Comput. 6 (1997), 295--313), we show that the number of triples of each color being at least $|X|/2-|Y|/6$ is sufficient. Finally we prove an Evans type result by showing that if $|Y|\geq 3|X|$, then any $q$-coloring of any subset of $\lambda \binom{X}{3}$ can be embedded into a $\lambda\binom{|Y|-1}{2}$-coloring of $\lambda \binom{Y}{3}$ as long as $q\leq \lambda \binom{|Y|-1}{2}-\lambda \binom{|X|}{3}/\lfloor{|X|/3}\rfloor$.Comment: 10 page

Latin cubes of even order with forbidden entries

We consider the problem of constructing Latin cubes subject to the condition that some symbols may not appear in certain cells. We prove that there is a constant $\gamma > 0$ such that if $n=2t$ and $A$ is a $3$-dimensional $n\times n\times n$ array where every cell contains at most $\gamma n$ symbols, and every symbol occurs at most $\gamma n$ times in every line of $A$, then $A$ is {\em avoidable}; that is, there is a Latin cube $L$ of order $n$ such that for every $1\leq i,j,k\leq n$, the symbol in position $(i,j,k)$ of $L$ does not appear in the corresponding cell of $A$.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1809.0239