Kemnitz' conjecture revisited

A conjecture of Kemnitz remained open for some 20 years: each sequence of 4n - 3 lattice points in the plane has a subsequence of length n whose centroid is a lattice point. It was solved independently by Reiher and di Fiore in the autumn of 2003. A refined and more general version of Kemnitz' conjecture is proved in this note. The main result is about sequences of lengths between 3p - 2 and 4p - 3 in the additive group of integer pairs modulo p, for the essential case of an odd prime p. We derive structural information related to their zero sums, implying a variant of the original conjecture for each of the lengths mentioned. The approach is combinatorial. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.