English

Quasimetric spaces with few lines

Combinatorics 2024-05-30 v1 Metric Geometry

Abstract

Chen and Chv\'atal conjectured in 2008 that in any finite metric space either there is a line containing all the points - a universal line -, or the number of lines is at least the number of points. This is a generalization of a classical result due to Erd\H{o}s that says that a set of nn non-collinear points in the Euclidean plane defines at least nn different lines. A line of a metric space with metric ρ\rho is defined in terms of a notion called the betweenness of the space which is the set of all triples (x,z,y)(x,z,y) such that ρ(x,y)=ρ(x,z)+ρ(z,y)\rho(x,y)=\rho(x,z)+\rho(z,y). In this work we prove that for each n4n\geq 4 there are p3(n)p_3(n) non isomorphic betweennesses arising from \emph{quasimetric} spaces with nn points, without universal lines and with exactly 3 lines, where p3(n)p_3(n) is the number of partitions of an integer nn into three parts. We also prove that for n5n\geq 5, there are 2p3(n1)2p_3(n-1) non isomorphic betweennesses arising from quasimetric spaces on nn points, without universal lines and with exactly 4 lines. Here two betweennesses are isomorphic if they are isomorphic as relational structures. None of the betweennesses mentioned above is metric which implies that Chen and Chv\'atal's conjecture is valid for metric spaces with at most five points.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2405.19208,
  title  = {Quasimetric spaces with few lines},
  author = {Guillermo Gamboa Quintero and Martín Matamala and Juan Pablo Peña},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.19208},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

19 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:45:48.480Z