English

The maximum number of digons formed by pairwise crossing pseudocircles

Combinatorics 2024-12-16 v1 Computational Geometry

Abstract

In 1972, Branko Gr\"unbaum conjectured that any arrangement of n>2n>2 pairwise crossing pseudocircles in the plane can have at most 2n22n-2 digons (regions enclosed by exactly two pseudoarcs), with the bound being tight. While this conjecture has been confirmed for cylindrical arrangements of pseudocircles and more recently for geometric circles, we extend these results to any simple arrangement of pairwise intersecting pseudocircles. Using techniques from the above-mentioned special cases, we provide a complete proof of Gr\"unbaum's conjecture that has stood open for over five decades.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.10023,
  title  = {The maximum number of digons formed by pairwise crossing pseudocircles},
  author = {Eyal Ackerman and Gábor Damásdi and Balázs Keszegh and Rom Pinchasi and Rebeka Raffay},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.10023},
  year   = {2024}
}