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ON COMMON DIVISORS OF MULTINOMIAL COEFFICIENTS

Part of: Sequences and sets Permutation groups Elementary number theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 October 2010

GEORGE M. BERGMAN
GEORGE M. BERGMAN*
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-3840, USA (email: gbergman@math.berkeley.edu)
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Abstract

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Erdős and Szekeres [‘Some number theoretic problems on binomial coefficients’, Aust. Math. Soc. Gaz.5 (1978), 97–99] showed that for any four positive integers satisfying m1+m2=n1+n2, the two binomial coefficients (m1+m2)!/m1!m2! and (n1+n2)!/n1!n2! have a common divisor greater than 1. The analogous statement for k-element families of k-nomial coefficients (k>1) was conjectured in 1997 by David Wasserman.

Erdős and Szekeres remark that if m1,m2,n1,n2 as above are all greater than 1, there is probably a lower bound on the common divisor in question which goes to infinity as a function of m1 +m2 . Such a bound is obtained in Section 2.

The remainder of this paper is devoted to proving results that narrow the class of possible counterexamples to Wasserman’s conjecture.

Keywords

common divisors of multinomial coefficients

MSC classification

Secondary: 11B65: Binomial coefficients; factorials; $q$-identities 11A63: Radix representation; digital problems 20B30: Symmetric groups
Type
Research Article
Information
Bulletin of the Australian Mathematical Society , Volume 83 , Issue 1 , February 2011 , pp. 138 - 157
Copyright
Copyright © Australian Mathematical Publishing Association Inc. 2010

References

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