Couplings and Matchings: Combinatorial notes on Strassen's theorem

Abstract: Some mathematical theorems represent ideas that are discovered again and again in different forms. One such theorem is Hall's marriage theorem. This theorem is equivalent to several other theorems in combinatorics and optimization theory, in the sense that these results can easily be derived from each other. In this paper it is shown that this equivalence extends to a finite version of Strassen's theorem, a celebrated result on couplings of probability measures. Though this equivalence is known, probabilistic or combinatorial proofs of this fact are lacking. A novel combinatorial lemma will be introduced that can be used to deduce both Hall's and Strassen's theorems.