English

Garment numbers of bi-colored point sets in the plane

Computational Geometry 2026-03-06 v1

Abstract

We consider colored variants of a class of geometric-combinatorial questions on kk-gons and empty kk-gons that have been started around 1935 by Erd\H{o}s and Szekeres. In our setting we have nn points in general position in the plane, each one colored either red or blue. A structure on kk points is a geometric graph where the edges are spanned by (some of) these points and is called monochromatic if all kk points have the same color. Already for k=4k=4 there exist interesting open problems. Most prominently, it is still open whether for any sufficiently large bichromatic set there always exists a convex empty, monochromatic quadrilateral. In order to shed more light on the underlying geometry we study the existence of five different monochromatic structures that all use exactly 4 points of a bichromatic point set. We provide several improved lower and upper bounds on the smallest nn such that every bichromatic set of at least nn points contains (some of) those monochromatic structures.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.05339,
  title  = {Garment numbers of bi-colored point sets in the plane},
  author = {Oswin Aichholzer and Helena Bergold and Simon D. Fink and Maarten Löffler and Patrick Schnider and Josef Tkadlec},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.05339},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Presented at EuroCG26