English

On Sets of Monochromatic Objects in Bicolored Point Sets

Combinatorics 2026-02-20 v1 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

Let PP be a set of nn points in the plane, not all on a line, each colored \emph{red} or \emph{blue}. The classical Motzkin--Rabin theorem guarantees the existence of a \emph{monochromatic} line. Motivated by the seminal work of Green and Tao (2013) on the Sylvester-Gallai theorem, we investigate the quantitative and structural properties of monochromatic geometric objects, such as lines, circles, and conics. We first show that if no line contains more than three points, then for all sufficiently large nn there are at least n2/24O(1)n^{2}/24 - O(1) monochromatic lines. We then show a converse of a theorem of Jamison (1986): Given n6n\ge 6 blue points and nn red points, if the blue points lie on a conic and every line through two blue points contains a red point, then all red points are collinear. We also settle the smallest nontrivial case of a conjecture of Mili\'cevi\'c (2018) by showing that if we have 55 blue points with no three collinear and 55 red points, if the blue points lie on a conic and every line through two blue points contains a red point, then all 1010 points lie on a cubic curve. Further, we analyze the random setting and show that, for any non-collinear set of n10n\ge 10 points independently colored red or blue, the expected number of monochromatic lines is minimized by the \emph{near-pencil} configuration. Finally, we examine monochromatic circles and conics, and exhibit several natural families in which no such monochromatic objects exist.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.17637,
  title  = {On Sets of Monochromatic Objects in Bicolored Point Sets},
  author = {Sujoy Bhore and Konrad Swanepoel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.17637},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

19 pages, 7 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:43:20.547Z