English

The motif problem

Combinatorics 2012-10-26 v1

Abstract

Fix a choice and ordering of four pairwise non-adjacent vertices of a parallelepiped, and call a motif a sequence of four points in R^3 that coincide with these vertices for some, possibly degenerate, parallelepiped whose edges are parallel to the axes. We show that a set of r points can contain at most r^2 motifs. Generalizing the notion of motif to a sequence of L points in R^p, we show that the maximum number of motifs that can occur in a point set of a given size is related to a linear programming problem arising from hypergraph theory, and discuss some related questions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1210.6667,
  title  = {The motif problem},
  author = {E. Rodney Canfield and Ron Fertig and R. Daniel Mauldin and David Moews},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1210.6667},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

17 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-06-21T22:27:22.105Z