Let be a prime number. Determine the largest possible such that the following holds. It is possible to fill an table with integers in the -th row and -th column, for , such that for any quadruple with and , the number is not divisible by .
Solution
The answer is . We first show that . Since we are interested only in divisibility by , we assume that . Note that each row and each column can have at most one zero. Also notice that we can scale each row or column by scalar not divisible by without affecting the given property of the table. Consider the first row, which must have at least non-zero values, say in the first columns. By scaling those columns by an appropriate scalar, we may assume that the first values in the first row are all 1's. Now in the second row, the first values must be distinct, hence , as desired.
We now construct for . Take the following grid. For ,
For a valid quadruple as described in the problem, it is simple to check it works when or . When and , the number turns out to be .