Abstract Singmaster’s conjecture asserts that every natural number greater than one occurs at most a bounded number of times in Pascal’s triangle; that is, for any natural number $$t \geq 2$$, the number of solutions to the equation $$\binom{n}{m} = t$$ for natural numbers $$1 \leq m \lt n$$ is bounded. In this paper we establish this result in the interior region $$\exp(\log^{2/3+\varepsilon} n) \leq m \leq n - \exp(\log^{2/3+\varepsilon} n)$$ for any fixed ɛ > 0. Indeed, when t is sufficiently large depending on ɛ, we show that there are at most four solutions (or at most two in either half of Pascal’s triangle) in this region. We also establish analogous results for the equation $$(n)_m = t$$, where $$(n)_m := n(n-1) \dots (n-m+1)$$ denotes the falling factorial.
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Singularity of random symmetric matrices revisited
Let M n M_n be drawn uniformly from all ± 1 \pm 1 symmetric n × n n \times n matrices. We show that the probability that M n M_n is singular is at most exp ( − c ( n log n ) 1 / 2 ) \exp (-c(n\log n)^{1/2}) , which represents a natural barrier in recent approaches to this problem. In addition to improving on the best-known previous bound of Campos, Mattos, Morris and Morrison of exp ( − c n 1 / 2 ) \exp (-c n^{1/2}) on the singularity probability, our method is different and considerably simpler: we prove a “rough” inverse Littlewood-Offord theorem by a simple combinatorial iteration.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2137623
- PAR ID:
- 10330634
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Mathematical Society
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society
- Volume:
- 150
- Issue:
- 757
- ISSN:
- 0002-9939
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 3147 to 3159
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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