λ-designs and related combinatorial configurations

This thesis deals with two problems. The first is the determination of λ-designs, combinatorial configurations which are essentially symmetric block designs with the condition that each subset be of the same cardinality negated. We construct an infinite family of such designs from symmetric block designs and obtain some basic results about their structure. These results enable us to solve the problem for λ = 3 and λ = 4. The second problem deals with configurations related to both λ -designs and (ѵ, k, λ)-configurations. We have (n-1) k-subsets of {1, 2, ..., n}, S 1 , ..., S n-1 such that S i ∩ S j is a λ-set for i ≠ j. We obtain specifically the replication numbers of such a design in terms of n, k, and λ with one exceptional class which we determine explicitly. In certain special cases we settle the problem entirely.