We prove that every permutation of a Cartesian product of two finite sets can be written as a composition of three permutations, the first of which only modifies the left projection, the second only the right projection, and the third again only the left projection, and three alternations is indeed the optimal number. We show that for two countably infinite sets, the corresponding optimal number of alternations, called the alternation diameter, is four. The notion of alternation diameter can be defined in any category. In the category of finite-dimensional vector spaces, the diameter is also three. For the category of topological spaces, we exhibit a single self-homeomorphism of the plane which is not generated by finitely many alternations of homeomorphisms that only change one coordinate. The results on finite sets and vector spaces were previously known in the context of memoryless computation.
Theorem is also known previously: the number @math of alternations needed for a product of length @math (which can be obtained from Theorem ) can be found in @cite_7 @cite_2 (for a larger class of modules). It turns out that @math is not optimal at least for finite fields: in [Theorem 2.1] CaFaGa14a it is proved that for over a finite field the optimal number of alternations for a product of length @math is @math .
@cite_7 @cite_2
2591592591 2529480917 2010163765 2042993834
This paper considers the problem of designing maximum distance separable (MDS) codes over small fields with constraints on the support of their generator matrices. For any given @math binary matrix @math , the GM-MDS conjecture, proposed by , states that if @math satisfies the so-called MDS condition, then for any field @math of size @math , there exists an @math MDS code whose generator matrix @math , with entries in @math , fits the matrix @math (i.e., @math is the support matrix of @math ). Despite all the attempts by the coding theory community, this conjecture remains still open in general. It was shown, independently by and , that the GM-MDS conjecture holds if the following conjecture, referred to as the TM-MDS conjecture, holds: if @math satisfies the MDS condition, then the determinant of a transform matrix @math , such that @math fits @math , is not identically zero, where @math is a Vandermonde matrix with distinct parameters. In this work, we first reformulate the TM-MDS conjecture in terms of the Wronskian determinant, and then present an algebraic-combinatorial approach based on polynomial-degree reduction for proving this conjecture. Our proof technique's strength is based primarily on reducing inherent combinatorics in the proof. We demonstrate the strength of our technique by proving the TM-MDS conjecture for the cases where the number of rows ( @math ) of @math is upper bounded by @math . For this class of special cases of @math where the only additional constraint is on @math , only cases with @math were previously proven theoretically, and the previously used proof techniques are not applicable to cases with @math . The seminal complete intersection theorem of Ahlswede and Khachatrian gives the maximum cardinality of a @math -uniform @math -intersecting family on @math points, and describes all optimal families. We extend this theorem to several other settings: the weighted case, the case of infinitely many points, and the Hamming scheme. The weighted Ahlswede-Khachatrian theorem gives the maximal @math measure of a @math -intersecting family on @math points, where @math . As has been observed by Ahlswede and Khachatrian and by Dinur and Safra, this theorem can be derived from the classical one by a simple reduction. However, this reduction fails to identify the optimal families, and only works for @math , using a different technique of Ahlswede and Khachatrian (the case @math is Katona's intersection theorem). We then extend the weighted Ahlswede-Khachatrian theorem to the case of infinitely many points. The Ahlswede-Khachatrian theorem on the Hamming scheme gives the maximum cardinality of a subset of @math in which any two elements @math have @math positions @math such that @math . We show that this case corresponds to @math with @math , extending work of Ahlswede and Khachatrian, who considered the case @math . We also determine the maximum cardinality families. We obtain similar results for subsets of @math , though in this case we are not able to identify all maximum cardinality families. We establish a lower bound for the formula size of quolynomials over arbitrary fields. Our basic formula operations are addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. The proof is based on Neciporuk’s [Soviet Math. Doklady, 7 (1966), pp. 999–1000] lower bound for Boolean functions and uses formal power series. This result immediately yields a lower bound for the formula size of rational functions over infinite fields. We also show how to adapt Neciporuk’s method to rational functions over finite fields. These results are then used to show that, over any field, the @math determinant function has formula size at least @math . We thus have an algebraic analogue to the @math lower bound for the Boolean determinant due to Kloss [Soviet Math. Doklady, 7 (1966), pp. 1537–1540]. The following theorem is proved. Let f(x_1, , x_m) be a binary nonzero polynomial of m variables of degree . H the number of binary m -tuples (a_1, , a_m) with f(a_1, , a_m) = 1 is less than 2^ m- +1 , then f can be reduced by an invertible affme transformation of its variables to one of the following forms. where m + and 3 . This theorem completely characterizes the codewords of the th-order Reed-Muller code whose weights are less than twice the minimum weight and leads to the weight enumerators for those codewords. These weight formulas are extensions of Berlekamp and Sloane's results.