New bounds for Ryser's conjecture and related problems

Understand

A Latin square of order $n$ is an $n \times n$ array filled with $n$ symbols such that each symbol appears only once in every row or column and a transversal is a collection of cells which do not share the same row, column or symbol.

• The study of Latin squares goes back more than 200 years to the work of Euler.
• One of the most famous open problems in this area is a conjecture of Ryser-Brualdi-Stein from 60s which says that every Latin square of order $n\times n$ contains a transversal of order $n-1$.
• In this paper we prove the existence of a transversal of order $n-O(\log{n}/\log{\log{n}})$, improving the celebrated bound of $n-O(\log^2n)$ by Hatami and Shor.