Signed magic rectangles with two filled cells in each column (Q6586643)

It is known that a magic rectangle of order \(m\times n\) \(\mathrm{MR}(m, n)\) is an arrangement of the numbers from 0 to \(mn - 1\) in an \(m\times n\) rectangle such that each number occurs exactly once in the rectangle and the sum of the entries of each row is the same and the sum of entries of each column is also the same. The authors of this paper define a signed magic rectangle \(\mathrm{SMR}(m, n; r, s)\) as an $m\times n$ array with entries from \(X\), where \(X=\{0,\pm 1, \pm 2, \dots, \pm (ms- 1)/2\}\) if \(mr\) is odd and \(X=\{\pm 1, \pm 2, \dots,\pm mr/2\}\) if \(mr\) is even, such that precisely \(r\) cells in every row and \(s\) cells in every column are filled, every integer from set \(X\) appears exactly once in the array and the sum of each row and of each column is zero. They also show that a signed magic rectangle \(\mathrm{SMR}(m, n; r, 2)\) exists if and only if \(m = 2\) and \(n = r\equiv 0, 3 \pmod 4\) or \(m, r\geq 3\) and \(mr = 2n\). They first prove a sequence of seventeen lemmas to show their main result.