Panmagic Permutations and N-ary Groups

Abstract

Panmagic permutations are permutations whose matrices are panmagic squares. Positions of 1-s in the latter describe maximal configurations of non-attacking queens on a toroidal chessboard. Some of them, affine panmagic permutations, can be conveniently described by linear formulas of modular arithmetic, and we show that their sets have remarkable algebraic properties when one multiplies three or more of them rather than just two. In group-theoretic terms, they are special cosets of the dihedral group in the group of all affine permutations. We also investigate decomposition of panmagic permutations into disjoint cycles and find many connections with classical topics of number theory: multiplicative orders, 4k+1 primes, primitive roots and quadratic residues.