The number of solutions to an equation arising from a problem on latin squares

Abstract A recent article of G. Chang shows that an n × n partial latin square with prescribed diagonal can always be embedded in an n × n latin square except in one obvious case where it cannot be done. Chang's proof is to show that the symbols of the partial latin square can be assigned the elements of the additive abelian group Zn so that the diagonal elements of the square sum to zero. A theorem of M. Halls then shows this to be embeddable in the operation table of the group. In this paper, we show that when n is a prime one can determine exactly the number of distinct ways in which this assignment can be made. The proof uses some graph theoretic techniques.