Related papers: The opaque square

A shortest circuit cover ${\cal F}$ of a bridgeless graph $G$ is a family of circuits that covers every edge of $G$ and is of minimum total length. The total length of a shortest circuit cover ${\cal F}$ of $G$ is denoted by $SCC(G)$. For…

We give a sharp lower bound to the largest possible Euclidean norm of signed sums of $n$ vectors in the plane. This is achieved by connecting the signed vector sum problem to the isoperimetric problem for the circumradius of polygons. In…

In 1775, Fagnano introduced the following geometric optimization problem: inscribe a triangle of minimal perimeter in a given acute-angled triangle. A widely accessible solution is provided by the Hungarian mathematician L. Fejer in 1900.…

Sixteen new linear codes are presented: three of them improve the lower bounds on the minimum distance for a linear code and the rest are an explicit construction of unknown codes attaining the lower bounds on the minimum distance. They are…

We study the problem of computing the minimum area triangle that circumscribes a given $n$-sided convex polygon touching edge-to-edge. In other words, we compute the minimum area triangle that is the intersection of 3 half-planes out of $n$…

A circular word, or a necklace, is an equivalence class under conjugation of a word. A fundamental question concerning regularities in standard words is bounding the number of distinct squares in a word of length $n$. The famous conjecture…

We prove an upper bound of $n+9$ for the strong separation number of the complete graph $K_n$, and an upper bound of $n+1$ for its weak separation number. This improves on the previous best known bound of $(1+o(1))n$ for both cases.

In the minimum $k$-cut problem, we want to find the minimum number of edges whose deletion breaks the input graph into at least $k$ connected components. The classic algorithm of Karger and Stein runs in $\tilde O(n^{2k-2})$ time, and…

A lower bound on the minimum required code length of binary codes is obtained. The bound is obtained based on observing a close relation between the Ulam's liar game and channel coding. In fact, Spencer's optimal solution to the game is…

In designing a network to link n cities in a square of area n, one might be guided by the following two desiderata. First, the total network length should not be much greater than the length of the shortest network connecting all cities.…

A spectrahedron is a set defined by a linear matrix inequality. Given a spectrahedron we are interested in the question of the smallest possible size $r$ of the matrices in the description by linear matrix inequalities. We show that for the…

We investigate minimal-perimeter configurations of two finite sets of points on the square lattice. This corresponds to a lattice version of the classical double-bubble problem. We give a detailed description of the fine geometry of…

We show that for any union-closed family $\mathcal{F} \subseteq 2^{[n]}, \mathcal{F} \neq \{\emptyset\}$, there exists an $i \in [n]$ which is contained in a $0.01$ fraction of the sets in $\mathcal{F}$. This is the first known constant…

The Ulam sequence is defined as $a_1 =1, a_2 = 2$ and $a_n$ being the smallest integer that can be written as the sum of two distinct earlier elements in a unique way. This gives $$1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 11, 13, 16, 18, 26, 28, 36, 38, 47,…

Let P be a planar n-point set. A k-partition of P is a subdivision of P into n/k parts of roughly equal size and a sequence of triangles such that each part is contained in a triangle. A line is k-shallow if it has at most k points of P…

We study the quantum query complexity of minor-closed graph properties, which include such problems as determining whether an $n$-vertex graph is planar, is a forest, or does not contain a path of a given length. We show that most…

In 1914 Lebesgue defined a "universal covering" to be a convex subset of the plane that contains an isometric copy of any subset of diameter 1. His challenge of finding a universal covering with the least possible area has been addressed by…

We continue and generalise our earlier investigations of the number of squares in binary recurrence sequences. Here we consider sequences, $\left( y_{k} \right)_{k=-\infty}^{\infty}$, arising from the solutions of generalised negative Pell…

What is the minimum perimeter of a convex lattice $n$-gon? This question was answered by Jarnik in 1926. We solve the same question in the case when perimeter is measured by a (not necessarily symmetric) norm.

In this paper we give a proof of an epiperimetric inequality in the setting of the lower dimensional obstacle problem. The inequality was introduced by Weiss (Invent. Math., 138 (1999), no. 1, 23-50) for the classical obstacle problem and…