Related papers: On a question of Erdos and Ulam

Erd\"os proved in 1946 that if a set $E\subset\mathbb{R}^n$ is closed and non-empty, then the set, called ambiguous locus or medial axis, of points in $\mathbb{R}^n$ with the property that the nearest point in $E$ is not unique, can be…

We show that for any set of reals X there is a subset Y such X and Y have same Lebesgue outer measure and the distance between any two distinct points in Y is irrational.

Richard Guy asked for the largest set of points which can be placed in the plane so that their pairwise distances are rational numbers. In this article, we consider such a set of rational points restricted to a given hyperbola. To be…

We report on the problem of the existence of complex and real algebraic curves in the plane with prescribed singularities up to analytic and topological equivalence. The question is whether, for a given positive integer $d$ and a finite…

It is an amazing and a bit counter-intuitive discovery by Micha Perles from the sixties that there are ``non-rational polytopes'': combinatorial types of convex polytopes that cannot be realized with rational vertex coordinates. We describe…

We state conditions under which the set S(k) of k-rational points on a del Pezzo surface S of degree 1 over an infinite field k of characteristic not equal to 2 or 3 is Zariski dense. For example, it suffices to require that the elliptic…

Assuming the abundance conjecture and the existence of a Zariski dense set of rational curves on terminal Calabi--Yau varieties, we show that a complex projective weakly special manifold $X$ with no rational curves is an \'etale quotient of…

We extend an earlier result by Dan Abramovich, showing that a conjecture of S. Lang's implies the existence of a uniform bound on the number of $K$-rational points over all smooth curves of genus $g$ defined over $K$, where $K$ is any…

The set of primes where a hypergeomeric series with rational parameters is $p$-adically bounded is known by [10] to have a Dirichlet density. We establish a formula for this Dirichlet density and conjecture that it is rare for the density…

We show that for any infinite set $A$ in ${\mathbb R}$, there exists a compact set $E \subseteq \mathbb{R}$ of positive Lebesgue measure that does not contain any non-trivial affine copy of $A$. This proves the Erd\"os similarity…

We construct two connected plane sets which can be embedded into rational curves. The first is a biconnected set with a dispersion point. It answers a question of Joachim Grispolakis. The second is indecomposable. Both examples are…

We classify all complex surfaces with quotient singularities that do not contain any smooth rational curves, under the assumption that the canonical divisor of the surface is not pseudo-effective. As a corollary we show that if $X$ is a log…

Let $f(z)=z^5+az^3+bz^2+cz+d \in \Z[z]$ and let us consider a del Pezzo surface of degree one given by the equation $\cal{E}_{f}: x^2-y^3-f(z)=0$. In this note we prove that if the set of rational points on the curve $E_{a,…

It is well known that an irreducible algebraic curve is rational (i.e. parametric) if and only if its genus is zero. In this paper, given a tolerance $\epsilon>0$ and an $\epsilon$-irreducible algebraic affine plane curve $\mathcal C$ of…

The purpose of this note is to wish a happy birthday to Professor Lucia Caporaso.* We prove that Conjecture H of Caporaso et. al. ([CHarM], sec. 6) together with Lang's conjecture implies the uniformity of rational points on varieties of…

Let $C$ be an irreducible projective plane curve in the complex projective space ${\mathbb{P}}^2$. The classification of such curves, up to the action of the automorphism group $PGL(3,{\mathbb{C}})$ on ${\mathbb{P}}^2$, is a very difficult…

New partial results are obtained related to the following old problem of Erd\"os: for any infinite set $X$ of real numbers to show that there is always a measurable (or, equivalently, closed) subset of reals of positive Lebesgue measure…

For a nontrivial measurable set on the real line, there are always exceptional points, where the lower and upper densities of the set are neither zero nor one. We quantify this statement, following work by V. Kolyada, and obtain the…

In each manifold $M$ modeled on a finite or infinite dimensional cube $[0,1]^n$ we construct a closed nowhere dense subset $S\subset M$ (called a spongy set) which is a universal nowhere dense set in $M$ in the sense that for each nowhere…

We consider the structure of rational points on elliptic curves in Weierstrass form. Let x(P)=A_P/B_P^2 denote the $x$-coordinate of the rational point P then we consider when B_P can be a prime power. Using Faltings' Theorem we show that…