thirty-six officers problem

Arrange 36 officers in a 6 × 6 square so that one officer from each of six regiments appears in each row and one from each of six ranks appears in each column. This problem, first posed by Leonhard Euler in 1779, is equivalent to finding two mutually orthogonal Latin squares of order six. Euler correctly conjectured that there was no solution; the search for a proof led to important developments in combinatorics.

Related category

• COMBINATORICS

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