Crescent configurations in normed spaces
Abstract
We study the problem of crescent configurations, posed by Erd\H{o}s in 1989. A crescent configuration is a set of 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 , there exists a distance which occurs exactly times. Constructions of sizes have been provided by Liu, Pal\'{a}sti, and Pomerance. Erd\H{o}s conjectured that there exists some for which there do not exist crescent configurations of size for all . We extend the problem of crescent configurations to general normed spaces by studying strong crescent configurations in . In an arbitrary norm , 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 , , and respectively. When defining strong crescent configurations, we introduce the notion of line-like configurations in . A line-like configuration in 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 circle. We prove that for , every line-like crescent configuration of size 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.
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