English

The right acute angles problem?

Metric Geometry 2020-02-04 v3 Combinatorics

Abstract

The Danzer--Gr\"unbaum acute angles problem asks for the largest size of a set of points in Rd{\mathbb R}^d that determines only acute angles. Recently, the problem was essentially solved thanks to the results of the second author and of Gerencs\'er and Harangi: now, the lower and the upper bounds are 2d1+12^{d-1}+1 and 2d12^d-1, respectively. The lower-bound construction is surprisingly simple. In this note, we suggest the following variant of the problem, which is one way to "save" the problem. Put F(α)=limdf(d,α)1/dF(\alpha) = \lim_{d\to \infty} f(d,\alpha)^{1/d}, where f(d,α)f(d,\alpha) is the largest set of points in Rd{\mathbb R}^d with no angle greater than α\alpha. Then the question is to find c:=limαπ/2F(α).c:= \lim_{\alpha\to \pi/2^-}F(\alpha). Although one may expect that c=2c=2 in view of the result of Gerencs\'er and Harangi, the best lower bound we could get is c2c\ge \sqrt 2. We also solve a related problem of Erdos and F\"uredi on the "stability" of the acute angles problem and refute another conjecture stated in the same paper.

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Cite

@article{arxiv.1910.00798,
  title  = {The right acute angles problem?},
  author = {Andrey Kupavskii and Dmitriy Zakharov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.00798},
  year   = {2020}
}

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