English

Improved upper bounds for the Heilbronn's Problem for $k$-gons

Discrete Mathematics 2024-05-22 v1 Computational Geometry Combinatorics

Abstract

The Heilbronn triangle problem asks for the placement of nn points in a unit square that maximizes the smallest area of a triangle formed by any three of those points. In 19721972, Schmidt considered a natural generalization of this problem. He asked for the placement of nn points in a unit square that maximizes the smallest area of the convex hull formed by any four of those points. He showed a lower bound of Ω(n3/2)\Omega(n^{-3/2}), which was improved to Ω(n3/2logn)\Omega(n^{-3/2}\log{n}) by Leffman. A trivial upper bound of 3/n3/n could be obtained, and Schmidt asked if this could be improved asymptotically. However, despite several efforts, no asymptotic improvement over the trivial upper bound was known for the last 5050 years, and the problem started to get the tag of being notoriously hard. Szemer{\'e}di posed the question of whether one can, at least, improve the constant in this trivial upper bound. In this work, we answer this question by proving an upper bound of 2/n+o(1/n)2/n+o(1/n). We also extend our results to any convex hulls formed by k4k\geq 4 points.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2405.12945,
  title  = {Improved upper bounds for the Heilbronn's Problem for $k$-gons},
  author = {Rishikesh Gajjala and Jayanth Ravi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.12945},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

To appear in the Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry (CCCG) 2024

R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:34:33.664Z