Related papers: Unit Distances in Three Dimensions
We prove that every set of $n$ points in $\mathbb{R}^3$ spans $O(n^{295/197+\epsilon})$ unit distances. This is an improvement over the previous bound of $O(n^{3/2})$. A key ingredient in the proof is a new result for cutting circles in…
The Erd\H os unit distance conjecture in the plane says that the number of pairs of points from a point set of size $n$ separated by a fixed (Euclidean) distance is $\leq C_{\epsilon} n^{1+\epsilon}$ for any $\epsilon>0$. The best known…
According to a classical result of Spencer, Szemer\'edi, and Trotter (1984), the maximum number of times the unit distance can occur among $n$ points in the plane is $O(n^{4/3})$. This is far from Erd\H{o}s's lower bound, $n^{1+O(1/\log\log…
In this note, we show that in planar pointsets determining many unit distances, these unit distances must span many directions. Specifically, we show that a set of $n$ points can determine only $o(n^{4/3})$ unit distances from a set of at…
In this paper we show that the number of distinct distances determined by a set of $n$ points on a constant-degree two-dimensional algebraic variety $V$ (i.e., a surface) in $\mathbb R^3$ is at least $\Omega\left(n^{7/9}/{\rm polylog}…
In 1946 Erd\H os asked for the maximum number of unit distances, $u(n)$, among $n$ points in the plane. He showed that $u(n)> n^{1+c/\log\log n}$ and conjectured that this was the true magnitude. The best known upper bound is…
A recent generalization of the Erd\H{o}s Unit Distance Problem, proposed by Palsson, Senger and Sheffer, asks for the maximum number of unit distance paths with a given number of vertices in the plane and in $3$-space. Studying a variant of…
For a given real number $\alpha$, let us place the fractional parts of the points $0, \alpha, 2 \alpha,$ $ \cdots, (N-1) \alpha$ on the unit circle. These points partition the unit circle into intervals having at most three lengths, one…
We first describe a reduction from the problem of lower-bounding the number of distinct distances determined by a set $S$ of $s$ points in the plane to an incidence problem between points and a certain class of helices (or parabolas) in…
Erd\H{o}s conjectured in 1946 that every n-point set P in convex position in the plane contains a point that determines at least floor(n/2) distinct distances to the other points of P. The best known lower bound due to Dumitrescu (2006) is…
In 1959, Erd\H{o}s and Moser asked for the maximum number of unit distances that may be formed among the vertices of a convex $n$-gon; until now, the best known upper bound has been $2\pi n \log_2 n + O(n)$, achieved by F\"uredi in 1990. In…
We prove a special case of Erd\H{o}s' unit distance problem using a corollary of the subspace theorem bounding the number of solutions of linear equations from a multiplicative group. We restrict our attention to unit distances coming from…
As a variant of the celebrated Szemer\'edi--Trotter theorem, Guth and Katz proved that $m$ points and $n$ lines in $\mathbb{R}^3$ with at most $\sqrt{n}$ lines in a common plane must determine at most $O(m^{1/2}n^{3/4})$ incidences for…
Let $S$ be a set of $n$ points in Euclidean $3$-space. Assign to each $x\in S$ a distance $r(x)>0$, and let $e_r(x,S)$ denote the number of points in $S$ at distance $r(x)$ from $x$. Avis, Erd\H{o}s and Pach (1988) introduced the extremal…
We prove that the number of unit distances among $n$ planar points is at most $1.94\cdot n^{4/3}$, improving on the previous best bound of $8n^{4/3}$. We also give better upper and lower bounds for several small values of $n$. We also prove…
In 1997, Erd\H{o}s asked whether for arbitrarily large $n$ there exists a set of $n$ points in $\mathbb{R}^2$ that determines $O(\frac{n}{\sqrt{\log n}})$ distinct distances while satisfying the local constraint that every 4-point subset…
We show that the number of unit-area triangles determined by a set of $n$ points in the plane is $O(n^{9/4+\epsilon})$, for any $\epsilon>0$, improving the recent bound $O(n^{44/19})$ of Dumitrescu et al.
We show that there are sets of $n$ points in the plane with $n$ arbitrarily large that contain more than $n^{1.014}$ pairs of points separated by a distance exactly $1$. This improves on very recent work of a team at OpenAI, who proved the…
In this paper, we prove Erd\H{o}s distance conjecture in $\mathbb{R}^d$, namely, a set of $n$ points in $\mathbb{R}^2$ determines $\Omega(\frac{n}{\sqrt{\log n}})$ distances, and for $d\ge 3$, a set of $n$ points in $\mathbb{R}^d$…
We give a shorter proof of a slightly weaker version of a theorem of Nets Katz and the author. We prove that if a set of $L$ lines in $\mathbb{R}^3$ contains at most $L^{1/2}$ lines in any low degree algebraic surface, then the number of…