English

Crescent configurations in normed spaces

Combinatorics 2019-11-20 v2

Abstract

We study the problem of crescent configurations, posed by Erd\H{o}s in 1989. A crescent configuration is a set of nn points in the plane such that: 1) no three points lie on a common line, 2) no four points lie on a common circle, 3) for each 1in11 \leq i \leq n - 1, there exists a distance which occurs exactly ii times. Constructions of sizes n8n \leq 8 have been provided by Liu, Pal\'{a}sti, and Pomerance. Erd\H{o}s conjectured that there exists some NN for which there do not exist crescent configurations of size nn for all nNn \geq N. We extend the problem of crescent configurations to general normed spaces (R2,)(\mathbb{R}^2, \| \cdot \|) by studying strong crescent configurations in \| \cdot \|. In an arbitrary norm \|\cdot \|, we construct a strong crescent configuration of size 4. We also construct larger strong crescent configurations in the Euclidean, taxicab, and Chebyshev norms, of sizes n6n \leq 6, n8n \leq 8, and n8n \leq 8 respectively. When defining strong crescent configurations, we introduce the notion of line-like configurations in \|\cdot \|. A line-like configuration in \|\cdot \| is a set of points whose distance graph is isomorphic to the distance graph of equally spaced points on a line. In a broad class of norms, we construct line-like configurations of arbitrary size. Our main result is a crescent-type result about line-like configurations in the Chebyshev norm. A line-like crescent configuration is a line-like configuration for which no three points lie on a common line and no four points lie on a common \|\cdot \| circle. We prove that for n7n \geq 7, every line-like crescent configuration of size nn in the Chebyshev norm must have a rigid structure. Specifically, it must be a perpendicular perturbation of equally spaced points on a horizontal or vertical line.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1909.08769,
  title  = {Crescent configurations in normed spaces},
  author = {Sara Fish and Dylan King and Steven J. Miller and Eyvindur A. Palsson and Catherine Wahlenmayer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.08769},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

27 pages, 15 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T11:19:49.853Z