English

Sets that contain their circle centers

Metric Geometry 2007-05-23 v1

Abstract

Say that a subset S of the plane is a "circle-center set" if S is not a subset of a line, and whenever we choose three noncollinear points from S, the center of the unique circle through those three points is also an element of S. A problem appearing on the Macalester College Problem of the Week website was to prove that a finite set of points in the plane, no three lying on a common line, cannot be a circle-center set. Various solutions to this problem that did not use the full strength of the hypotheses appeared, and the conjecture was subsequently made that every circle-center set is unbounded. In this article, we prove a stronger assertion, namely that every circle-center set is dense in the plane, or equivalently that the only closed circle-center set is the entire plane. Along the way we show connections between our geometrical method of proof and number theory, real analysis, and topology.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.math/0703860,
  title  = {Sets that contain their circle centers},
  author = {Greg Martin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:math/0703860},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

12 pages, 4 figures