English

Crossing and intersecting families of geometric graphs on point sets

Combinatorics 2022-11-21 v1 Computational Geometry

Abstract

Let SS be a set of nn points in the plane in general position. Two line segments connecting pairs of points of SS cross if they have an interior point in common. Two vertex disjoint geometric graphs with vertices in SS cross if there are two edges, one from each graph, which cross. A set of vertex disjoint geometric graphs with vertices in SS is called mutually crossing if any two of them cross. We show that there exists a constant cc such that from any family of nn mutually crossing triangles, one can always obtain a family of at least ncn^c mutually crossing 22-paths (each of which is the result of deleting an edge from one of the triangles) and then provide an example that implies that cc cannot be taken to be larger than 2/32/3. For every nn we determine the maximum number of crossings that a Hamiltonian cycle on a set of nn points might have. Next, we construct a point set whose longest perfect matching contains no crossings. We also consider edges consisting of a horizontal and a vertical line segment joining pairs of points of SS, which we call elbows, and prove that in any point set SS there exists a family of n/4\lfloor n/4 \rfloor vertex disjoint mutually crossing elbows. Additionally, we show a point set that admits no more than n/3n/3 mutually crossing elbows. Finally we study intersecting families of graphs, which are not necessarily vertex disjoint. A set of edge disjoint graphs with vertices in SS is called an intersecting family if for any two graphs in the set we can choose an edge in each of them such that they cross. We prove a conjecture by Lara and Rubio-Montiel, namely, that any set SS of nn points in general position admits a family of intersecting triangles with a quadratic number of elements. Some other results are obtained throughout this work.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2211.09904,
  title  = {Crossing and intersecting families of geometric graphs on point sets},
  author = {José Luis Álvarez-Rebollar and Jorge Cravioto-Lagos and Nestaly Marín and Oriol Solé-Pi and Jorge Urrutia},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.09904},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

19 pages, 14 figures