Decomposition of Convex Figures into Similar Pieces.
We consider the defect theorem in the context of labelled polyominoes, i.e., two-dimensional figures. The classical version of this property states that if a set of n words is not a code then the words can be expressed as a product of at most n - 1 words, the smaller set being a code. We survey several two-dimensional extensions exhibiting the boundaries where the theorem fails. In particular, we establish the defect property in the case of three dominoes (n × 1 or 1 × n rectangles).
The notion of designs in Grassmannian spaces was introduced by the author and R. Coulangeon, G. Nebe, in [3]. After having recalled some basic properties of these objects and the connections with the theory of lattices, we prove that the sequence of Barnes-Wall lattices hold -Grassmannian designs. We also discuss the connections between the notion of Grassmannian design and the notion of design associated with the symmetric space of the totally isotropic subspaces in a binary quadratic space, which...
An n by n skew-symmetric type (-1; 1)-matrix K =[ki;j ] has 1’s on the main diagonal and ±1’s elsewhere with ki;j =-kj;i . The largest possible determinant of such a matrix K is an interesting problem. The literature is extensive for n ≡ 0 mod 4 (skew-Hadamard matrices), but for n ≡ 2 mod 4 there are few results known for this question. In this paper we approach this problem constructing cocyclic matrices over the dihedral group of 2t elements, for t odd, which are equivalent to (-1; 1)-matrices...