A Novel Approach to Counterexamples of the Polujan-Pott Conjecture via Set-Partition Permutations
In this paper, we settle a conjecture of Polujan and Pott by constructing an explicit, infinite family of Maiorana--McFarland bent functions $f_t$ in $2(2^t-1)$ variables with algebraic degree $\deg(f_t) = t + 1$ for any integer $t \ge 2$. Our construction builds upon a minimal commutative algebra $I_t$, which naturall...