Related papers: Lines, betweenness and metric spaces
We study the classical result by Bruijn and Erd\H os regarding the bound on the number of lines determined by a $n$-point configuration in the plane, and in the light of the recently proven Tropical Sylvester-Gallai theorem, come up with a…
We define lines of minima in the thick part of Outer space for the free group Fn with n>2 generators. We show that these lines of minima are contracting for the Lipschitz metric. Every fully irreducible outer automorphism of Fn defines such…
One of the earliest results in enumerative combinatorial geometry is the following theorem of de Bruijn and Erd\H{o}s: Every set of points $E$ in a projective plane determines at least $|E|$ lines, unless all the points are contained in a…
The famous Szemer\'{e}di-Trotter theorem states that any arrangement of $n$ points and $n$ lines in the plane determines $O(n^{4/3})$ incidences, and this bound is tight. In this paper, we prove the following Tur\'an-type result for…
Let $(X, d)$ be an unbounded metric space. To investigate the asymptotic behavior of $(X, d)$ at infinity, one can consider a sequence of rescaling metric spaces $(X, \frac{1}{r_n} d)$ generated by given sequence $(r_n)_{n \in \mathbb N}$…
Let $P$ be a set of $n$ points in general position in the plane. Let $R$ be a set of $n$ points disjoint from $P$ such that for every $x,y \in P$ the line through $x$ and $y$ contains a point in $R$ outside of the segment delimited by $x$…
Many geometric optimization problems can be reduced to finding points in space (centers) minimizing an objective function which continuously depends on the distances from the centers to given input points. Examples are $k$-Means, Geometric…
In 1953, Blumenthal showed that every semi-metric space that is isometrically embeddable in a Hilbert space has the n-point property; we have previously called such spaces supermetric spaces. Although this is a strictly stronger property…
We define a pseudometric on the set of all unbounded subsets of a metric space. The Kolmogorov quotient of this pseudometric space is a complete metric space. The definition of the pseudometric is guided by the principle that two unbounded…
Let $(X,d)$ be an unbounded metric space and $\tilde r=(r_n)_{n\in\mathbb N}$ be a scaling sequence of positive real numbers tending to infinity. We define the pretangent space $\Omega_{\infty, \tilde r}^{X}$ to $(X, d)$ at infinity as a…
The width $w$ of a curve $\gamma$ in Euclidean space $R^n$ is the infimum of the distances between all pairs of parallel hyperplanes which bound $\gamma$, while its inradius $r$ is the supremum of the radii of all spheres which are…
In this paper, we prove that a set of $N$ points in ${\bf R}^2$ has at least $c{N \over \log N}$ distinct distances, thus obtaining the sharp exponent in a problem of Erd\"os. We follow the set-up of Elekes and Sharir which, in the spirit…
We construct a set of $2^n$ points in $\mathbb{R}^n$ such that all pairwise Manhattan distances are odd integers, which improves the recent linear lower bound of Golovanov, Kupavskii and Sagdeev. In contrast to the Euclidean and maximum…
A set of lines in $\mathbb{R}^n$ is called equiangular if the angle between each pair of lines is the same. We address the question of determining the maximum size of equiangular line sets in $\mathbb{R}^n$, using semidefinite programming…
Erd\H{o}s' unit distance problem and Erd\H{o}s' distinct distances problem are among the most classical and well-known open problems in discrete mathematics. They ask for the maximum number of unit distances, or the minimum number of…
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}…
Consider the hypergraph whose vertex set is a family of $n$ lines in general position in the plane, and whose hyperedges are induced by intersections with a family of pseudo-discs. We prove that the number of $t$-hyperedges is bounded by…
We consider the numbers of positive and negative eigenvalues of matrices of squared distances between randomly sampled i.i.d. points in a given metric measure space. These numbers and their limits, as the number of points grows, in fact…
Solving a longstanding problem on equiangular lines, we determine, for each given fixed angle and in all sufficiently large dimensions, the maximum number of lines pairwise separated by the given angle. Fix $0 < \alpha < 1$. Let…
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…