The Erdős-Ginzburg-Ziv theorem states that every sequence of integers contains
terms whose sum is divisible by
. Equivalently, every sequence
of
elements of the cyclic group
has an
-term zero-sum subsequence
(Qu 2026).
The length is sharp. A sequence consisting of zeros and
ones has no
-term zero-sum subsequence.
Thus the Gao constant of a cyclic
group of order
is
.
A counting refinement is the Bialostocki-Lotspeich conjecture, proved by Wang and Zeng (2026).
For higher-rank finite Abelian groups, the corresponding threshold is the Erdős-Ginzburg-Ziv constant.