This is a small aside. While reading a paper by Grüner, Laue, and Meringer on generation by homomorphism they mentioned the Gale-Ryser (GR) theorem. As it turns out, this is a nice small theorem closely related to the better known Erdős-Gallai (EG).
So, GR says that given two partitions of an integer (p and q) there exists a (0, 1) matrixA iff p*dominatesq such that the row sum vector r(A) = p and the column sum vector c(A) = q.
As with most mathematics, that's quite terse and full of terminology like 'dominates' : but it's relatively simple. Here is an example:
The partitions p and q are at the top left, they both sum to 10. Next, p is transposed to get p* = [5, 4, 1] and this is compared to q at the bottom left. Since the sum at each point in the sequence is greater (or equal) for p* than q, the former dominates. One possible matrix is at the top left with the row sum vector to the right, and the column sum vector below.
Finally, the matrix can be interpreted as a bi…
So, GR says that given two partitions of an integer (p and q) there exists a (0, 1) matrixA iff p*dominatesq such that the row sum vector r(A) = p and the column sum vector c(A) = q.
As with most mathematics, that's quite terse and full of terminology like 'dominates' : but it's relatively simple. Here is an example:
The partitions p and q are at the top left, they both sum to 10. Next, p is transposed to get p* = [5, 4, 1] and this is compared to q at the bottom left. Since the sum at each point in the sequence is greater (or equal) for p* than q, the former dominates. One possible matrix is at the top left with the row sum vector to the right, and the column sum vector below.
Finally, the matrix can be interpreted as a bi…