English

A Sylvester-Gallai theorem for cubic curves

Combinatorics 2022-01-04 v2

Abstract

We prove a variant of the Sylvester-Gallai theorem for cubics (algebraic curves of degree three): If a finite set of sufficiently many points in R2\mathbb{R}^2 is not contained in a cubic, then there is a cubic that contains exactly nine of the points. This resolves the first unknown case of a conjecture of Wiseman and Wilson from 1988, who proved a variant of Sylvester-Gallai for conics and conjectured that similar statements hold for curves of any degree.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2010.01513,
  title  = {A Sylvester-Gallai theorem for cubic curves},
  author = {Alex Cohen and Frank de Zeeuw},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.01513},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

10 pages, accepted to European Journal of Combinatorics

R2 v1 2026-06-23T19:00:37.446Z