English

A few more Lonely Runners

Combinatorics 2023-07-31 v3

Abstract

Lonely Runner Conjecture, proposed by J\"{o}rg M. Wills and so nomenclatured by Luis Goddyn, has been an object of interest since it was first conceived in 1967 : Given positive integers kk and n1,n2,,nkn_1,n_2,\ldots,n_k there exists a positive real number tt such that the distance of tnjt\cdot n_j to the nearest integer is at least 1k+1\frac{1}{k+1},   1jk\forall~~1\leq j\leq k. In a recent article Beck, Hosten and Schymura described the Lonely Runner polyhedron and provided a polyhedral approach to identifying families of lonely runner instances. We revisit the Lonely Runner polyhedron and highlight some new families of instances satisfying the conjecture. In addition, we relax the sufficiency of existence of an integer point in the Lonely Runner polyhedron to prove the conjecture. Specifically, we propose that it suffices to show the existence of a lattice point of certain superlattices of the integer lattice in the Lonely Runner polyhedron.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2211.08749,
  title  = {A few more Lonely Runners},
  author = {Avinash Bhardwaj and Vishnu Narayanan and Hrishikesh Venkataraman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.08749},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T06:01:08.311Z