pandas DataFrame - find max between offset columns

Suppose I have a pandas dataframe given by import pandas as pd import numpy as np df = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(5,2)) df 0 1 0 0.264053 -1.225456 1 0.805492 -1.072943 2 0.142433 -0.469905 3 0.758322 0.804881 4 -0.281493 0.602433 I want to return a Series object with 4 rows, containing max(df[0,0], df[1,1]), max(df[1,0], df[2,1]), max(df[2,0], df[3,1]), max(df[3,0], df[4,1]). More generally, what is the best way to compare the max of column 0 and column 1 offset by n rows? Thanks.