login

Year-end appeal: Please make a donation to the OEIS Foundation to support ongoing development and maintenance of the OEIS. We are now in our 61st year, we have over 378,000 sequences, and we’ve reached 11,000 citations (which often say “discovered thanks to the OEIS”).

A006204
Number of starters in cyclic group of order 2n+1.
(Formerly M2802)
1
1, 1, 3, 9, 25, 133, 631, 3857, 25905, 188181, 1515283, 13376125, 128102625, 1317606101, 14534145947, 170922533545, 2138089212789
OFFSET
1,3
COMMENTS
A complete mapping of a cyclic group (Z_m,+) is a permutation f(x) of Z_m with f(0)=0 such that f(x)-x is also a permutation. a(n) is the number of complete mappings f(x) of the cyclic group Z_{2n+1} such that f^(-1)=f.
In other words, a(n) is the number of complete mappings fixed under the reflection operator R, where R(f)=f^(-1). Reflection R is not only a symmetry operator of complete mappings, but also one of the (Toroidal)-(semi) N-Queen problems and of the strong complete mappings problem.
REFERENCES
CRC Handbook of Combinatorial Designs, 1996, p. 469.
CRC Handbook of Combinatorial Designs, 2nd edition, 2007, p. 624.
J. D. Horton, Orthogonal starters in finite Abelian groups, Discrete Math., 79 (1989/1990), 265-278.
V. Linja-aho and Patric R. J. Östergård, Classification of starters, J. Combin. Math. Combin. Comput. 75 (2010), 153-159.
Y. P. Shieh, "Partition strategies for #P-complete problems with applications to enumerative combinatorics", PhD thesis, National Taiwan University, 2001.
Y. P. Shieh, J. Hsiang and D. F. Hsu, "On the enumeration of Abelian k-complete mappings", vol. 144 of Congressus Numerantium, 2000, pp. 67-88.
N. J. A. Sloane and Simon Plouffe, The Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, Academic Press, 1995 (includes this sequence).
LINKS
Jieh Hsiang, Yuhpyng Shieh, Yaochiang Chen, Cyclic complete mappings counting problems, National Taiwan University, Taipei, April 2003.
Vesa Linja-aho, Patric R. J. Östergård, Classification of starters, J. Combin. Math. Combin. Comput. 75 (2010), 153-159.
EXAMPLE
f(x)=6x in (Z_7,+) is a complete mapping of Z_7 since f(0)=0 and f(x)-x (=5x) is also a permutation of Z_7. f^(-1)(x)=6x=f(x). So f(x) is fixed under reflection.
CROSSREFS
KEYWORD
nonn,nice,hard,more
EXTENSIONS
Additional comments and one more term from J. Hsiang, D. F. Hsu and Y. P. Shieh (arping(AT)turing.csie.ntu.edu.tw), Jun 03 2002
Corrected and extended by Roland Bacher, Dec 18 2007
Extended by Vesa Linja-aho (vesa.linja-aho(AT)tkk.fi), May 06 2009
STATUS
approved