arXiv · 2410.06612
Some observations on Erdős matrices
Abstract
In a seminal paper in 1959, Marcus and Ree proved that every $n\times n$ bistochastic matrix $A$ satisfies $\|A\|_{\operatorname{F}}^2\leq \max_{σ\in S_n}A_{i,σ(i)}$ where $S_n$ is the symmetric group on $\{1, \ldots, n\}$. Erdős asked to characterize the bistochastic matrices for which the equality holds in the Marcus--Ree inequality. We refer to such matrices as Erdős matrices. While this problem is trivial in dimension $n=2$, the case of dimension $n=3$ was only resolved recently in~\cite{bouthat2024question} in 2023. We prove that for every $n$, there are only finitely many $n\times n$ Erdős matrices. We also give a characterization of Erdős matrices that yields an algorithm to generate all Erdős matrices in any given dimension. We also prove that Erdős matrices can have only rational entries. This answers a question of~\cite{bouthat2024question}.
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Raghavendra Tripathi. 2024-12-13. Some observations on Erdős matrices. https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.06612
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