English

The Erd\H{o}s unit distance problem for small point sets

Combinatorics 2025-02-14 v2 Metric Geometry

Abstract

We improve the best known upper bound on the number of edges in a unit-distance graph on nn vertices for each n{16,,30}n\in\{16,\ldots,30\}. When n21n\leq 21, our bounds match the best known lower bounds, and we fully enumerate the densest unit-distance graphs in these cases. On the combinatorial side, our principle technique is to more efficiently generate F\mathcal{F}-free graphs for a set of forbidden subgraphs F\mathcal{F}. On the algebraic side, we are able to determine programmatically whether many graphs are unit-distance, using a custom embedder that is more efficient in practice than tools such as cylindrical algebraic decomposition.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.11914,
  title  = {The Erd\H{o}s unit distance problem for small point sets},
  author = {Boris Alexeev and Dustin G. Mixon and Hans Parshall},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.11914},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

18 pages, 3 tables, 63 figures; v2 has only minor changes; see also ancillary file graph6.txt

R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:37:16.574Z