Related papers: The opaque square
We study the simplex method over polyhedra satisfying certain "discrete curvature" lower bounds, which enforce that the boundary always meets vertices at sharp angles. Motivated by linear programs with totally unimodular constraint…
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 blocking set in an affine plane is a set of points $B$ such that every line contains at least one point of $B$. The best known lower bound for blocking sets in arbitrary (non-desarguesian) affine planes was derived in the 1980's by Bruen…
We show that for the regular n-simplex, the 1-codimensional central slice that's parallel to a facet will achieve the minimum area (up to a 1-o(1) factor) among all 1-codimensional central slices, thus improving the previous best known…
In 1946 Fine and Niven posed problem E724, asking to demonstrate that every hypercube can be tiled by any number of hypercubic tiles larger than some value. This requires only basic number theory, but the problem of finding the smallest…
In 1958, S. \'Swierczkowski proved that there cannot be a closed loop of congruent interior-disjoint regular tetrahedra that meet face-to-face. Such closed loops do exist for the other four regular polyhedra. It has been conjectured that,…
In this paper, we address the minimum-area rectangular and square annulus problem, which asks a rectangular or square annulus of minimum area, either in a fixed orientation or over all orientations, that encloses a set $P$ of $n$ input…
In this paper, we study the problem of computing a minimum-width axis-aligned cubic shell that encloses a given set of $n$ points in a three-dimensional space. A cubic shell is a closed volume between two concentric and face-parallel cubes.…
The inner distance of a Latin square was defined by myself and six others during an REU in the Summer of 2020 at Moravian College. Since then, I have been curious about its possible connections to other combinatorial mathematics. The inner…
A classic theorem of Euclidean geometry asserts that any noncollinear set of $n$ points in the plane determines at least $n$ distinct lines. Chen and Chv\'atal conjectured that this holds for an arbitrary finite metric space, with a certain…
A $(1+\epsilon)$-approximate distance oracle of an edge-weighted graph is a data structure that returns an approximate shortest path distance between any two query vertices up to a $(1+\epsilon)$ factor. Thorup (FOCS 2001, JACM 2004) and…
A power is a word of the form $\underbrace{uu...u}_{k \; \text{times}}$, where $u$ is a word and $k$ is a positive integer and a square is a word of the form $uu$. Fraenkel and Simpson conjectured in 1998 that the number of distinct squares…
We consider the problem of lower bounding a generalized Minkowski measure of subsets of a convex body with a log-concave probability measure, conditioned on the set size. A bound is given in terms of diameter and set size, which is sharp…
Diameter -- the task of computing the length of a longest shortest path -- is a fundamental graph problem. Assuming the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis, there is no $O(n^{1.99})$-time algorithm even in sparse graphs [Roditty and…
For minimally $k$-connected graphs on $n$ vertices, Mader proved a tight lower bound for the number $|V_k|$ of vertices of degree $k$ in dependence on $n$ and $k$. Oxley observed 1981 that in many cases a considerably better bound can be…
The least squares fit to a straight line, when both variables are affected by all equal uncorrelated errors, leads to very simple results for both the estimated parameters and their standard errors, of widespread applicability. In this…
We prove a new lower bound for the unitary synthesis problem in the so-called 1.5-query setting. Our analysis establishes that any attempt to implement arbitrary n-qubit unitaries via limited oracle access requires resources that exceed the…
Quantum tunneling across multiple barriers as yet is an unsolved problem for barrier numbers greater than five. The complexity of the mathematical analysis even for small number of barriers pushed it into the realms of Numerical Analysis.…
The colourful simplicial depth problem in dimension d is to find a configuration of (d+1) sets of (d+1) points such that the origin is contained in the convex hull of each set (colour) but contained in a minimal number of colourful…
A pebbling move on a graph consists of removing $2$ pebbles from a vertex and adding $1$ pebble to one of the neighbouring vertices. A vertex is called reachable if we can put $1$ pebble on it after a sequence of moves. The optimal pebbling…