Extreme probabilities for contingency tables under row and column independence with application to fisher's exact test

Theorerms are proved for the maxima and minima of IIRi!/IICj!/T!IIyij ! over r× c contingcncy tables Y=(yij) with row sums R1,…,Rr, column sums C1,…,Cc, and grand total T. These results are imlplemented into the network algorithm of Mehta and Patel (1983) for computing the P-value of Fisher's exact test for unordered r×c contingency tables. The decrease in the amount of computing time can be substantial when the column sums are very different.