On the Maximal Number of Pairwise Orthogonal Latin Squares of a Given Order

Abstract

In the preceding paper Bose, Shrikhande, and Parker give their important discovery of the disproof of Euler's conjecture on Latin squares. In this paper we show that their results can be strengthened to imply that N(n), the maximal number of pairwise orthogonal Latin squares of order n, tends to infinity with n. In fact there exists a positive constant c, such that N(n) > n^c for all sufficiently large n.Our proof involves no new combinatorial insights, but is based entirely on a number-theoretical investigation of the following inequality due to Bose and Shrikhande.