Related papers: Classification theorem for strong triangle blockin…
The main purpose of this paper is to find double blocking sets in $\mathrm{PG}(2,q)$ of size less than $3q$, in particular when $q$ is prime. To this end, we study double blocking sets in $\mathrm{PG}(2,q)$ of size $3q-1$ admitting at least…
In this paper we present a complete characterization of the smallest sets that block all the simple spanning trees (SSTs) in a complete geometric graph. We also show that if a subgraph is a blocker for all SSTs of diameter at most 4, then…
In this note, we show that extremal Szemer\'{e}di-Trotter configurations are rigid in the following sense: If $P,L$ are sets of points and lines determining at least $C|P|^{2/3}|L|^{2/3}$ incidences, then there exists a collection $P'$ of…
In this paper we give some basic results on blocking sets on minimum size for a finite chain geometry.
Let $P$ be a set of $n$ points in the plane, and let $\mathcal C$ be a collection of $n$ simple $k$-intersecting curves, meaning that every two distinct curves of $\mathcal C$ meet in at most $k$ points. A classical theorem of Pach and…
Given a rank 3 real arrangement $\mathcal A$ of $n$ lines in the projective plane, the Dirac-Motzkin conjecture (proved by Green and Tao in 2013) states that for $n$ sufficiently large, the number of simple intersection points of $\mathcal…
A famous theorem of Kirkman says that there exists a Steiner triple system of order $n$ if and only if $n\equiv 1,3\mod{6}$. In 1973, Erd\H{o}s conjectured that one can find so-called `sparse' Steiner triple systems. Roughly speaking, the…
We study the maximal number of triangulations that a planar set of $n$ points can have, and show that it is at most $30^n$. This new bound is achieved by a careful optimization of the charging scheme of Sharir and Welzl (2006), which has…
In this paper we prove that a set of points $B$ of PG(n,2) is a minimal blocking set if and only if $<B>=PG(d,2)$ with $d$ odd and $B$ is a set of $d+2$ points of $PG(d,2)$ no $d+1$ of them in the same hyperplane. As a corollary to the…
The intersection of two Steiner triple systems (X,A) and (X,B) is the set A intersect B. The fine intersection problem for Steiner triple systems is to determine for each v, the set I(v), consisting of all possible pairs (m,n) such that…
In this paper, we are concerned with the study of the existence of fixed points for single and multi-valued three-points contractions. Namely, we first introduce a new class of single-valued mappings defined on a metric space equipped with…
We introduce the abstract notion of a chain, which is a sequence of $n$ points in the plane, ordered by $x$-coordinates, so that the edge between any two consecutive points is unavoidable as far as triangulations are concerned. A general…
Let $n$ be a positive integer. Denote by $\mathrm{PG}(n,q)$ the $n$-dimensional projective space over the finite field $\mathbb{F}_q$ of order $q$. A blocking set in $\mathrm{PG}(n,q)$ is a set of points that has non-empty intersection with…
Kelly's theorem states that a set of $n$ points affinely spanning $\mathbb{C}^3$ must determine at least one ordinary complex line (a line passing through exactly two of the points). Our main theorem shows that such sets determine at least…
An instance of a strongly stable matching problem (SSMP) is an undirected bipartite graph $G=(A \cup B, E)$, with an adjacency list of each vertex being a linearly ordered list of ties, which are subsets of vertices equally good for a given…
The cross-ratio degree problem counts configurations of n points on P^1 with n-3 prescribed cross-ratios. Cross-ratio degrees arise in many corners of combinatorics and geometry, but their structure is not well-understood in general.…
Block Sorting is a well studied problem, motivated by its applications in Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and Computational Biology. Block Sorting has been shown to be NP-Hard, and two separate polynomial time 2-approximation…
We prove three theorems giving extremal bounds on the incidence structures determined by subsets of the points and blocks of a balanced incomplete block design (BIBD). These results generalize and strengthen known bounds on the number of…
Given a set of $n$ men represented by $n$ points lying on a line, and $n$ women represented by $n$ points lying on another parallel line, with each person having a list that ranks some people of opposite gender as his/her acceptable…
Restriction is a natural quasi-order on $d$-way tensors. We establish a remarkable aspect of this quasi-order in the case of tensors over a fixed finite field -- namely, that it is a well-quasi-order: it admits no infinite antichains and no…