English

The betweenness relation distinguishes non-similar pairs of concentric circles

Metric Geometry 2024-12-04 v1

Abstract

Two subsets A,BA, B of the plane are betweenness isomorphic if there is a bijection f ⁣:ABf\colon A\to B such that, for every x,y,zAx,y,z\in A, the point f(z)f(z) lies on the line segment connecting f(x)f(x) and f(y)f(y) if and only if zz lies on the line segment connecting xx and yy. In general, it is quite difficult to tell whether two given subsets of the plane are betweenness isomorphic. We concentrate on the case when the sets A,BA,B belong to the family Ac \mathcal A_c of unions of pairs of concentric circles in the plane. We prove that A,BAcA, B \in \mathcal A_c are betweenness isomorphic if and only if they are similar. In particular, there are continuum many betweenness isomorphism classes in Ac \mathcal A_c, and each of these classes consists exactly of all scaled translations of an arbitrary representative of the class. Furthermore, we show that every betweenness isomorphism between sets A,BAcA,B\in \mathcal A_c is exactly the restriction of a scaled isometry of the plane.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.02495,
  title  = {The betweenness relation distinguishes non-similar pairs of concentric circles},
  author = {Martin Doležal and Jan Kolář and Janusz Morawiec},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.02495},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

22 pages with 4 figures