Related papers: A remark on sets with few distances in $\mathbb{R}…

In a recent paper Petrov and Pohoata developed a new algebraic method which combines the Croot-Lev-Pach Lemma from additive combinatorics and Sylvester's Law of Inertia for real quadratic forms. As an application, they gave a simple proof…

It is widely believed that point sets in the plane which determine few distinct distances must have some special structure. In particular, such sets are believed to be similar to a lattice. This note considers two different ways to quantify…

(i) We provide a short and simple proof of the first selection lemma. (ii) We also prove a selection lemma of a new type in $\Re^d$. For example, when $d=2$ assuming $n$ is large enough we prove that for any set $P$ of $n$ points in general…

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…

For a set of distances D={d_1,...,d_k} a set A is called D-avoiding if no pair of points of A is at distance d_i for some i. We show that the density of A is exponentially small in k provided the ratios d_1/d_2, d_2/d_3, ..., d_{k-1}/d_k…

We study the structure of planar point sets that determine a small number of distinct distances. Specifically, we show that if a set P of n points determines o(n) distinct distances, then no line contains \Omega(n^{7/8}) points of P and no…

Recently, it has been shown that a connected graph $\Gamma$ with $d+1$ distinct eigenvalues and odd-girth $2d+1$ is distance-regular. The proof of this result was based on the spectral excess theorem. In this note we present an alternative…

Guth and Katz proved that any point set $\mathcal P$ in the plane determines $\Omega(|\mathcal P|/\log|\mathcal P|)$ distinct distances. We show that when near to this lower bound, a point set $\mathcal P$ of the form $A\times A$ must…

Using a slight modification of an argument of Croot, Ruzsa and Schoen we establish a quantitative result on the existence of a dilated copy of any given configuration of integer points in sparse difference sets. More precisely, given any…

The Sylvester-Gallai theorem states that for a finite set of points in the plane, if every line determined by any two of these points also contains a third, then the set is necessarily made of collinear points. In this paper, we first…

This paper introduces a new problem concerning additive properties of convex sets. Let $S= \{s_1 < \dots <s_n \}$ be a set of real numbers and let $D_i(S)= \{s_x-s_y: 1 \leq x-y \leq i\}$. We expect that $D_i(S)$ is large, with respect to…

Given a regular (connected) graph $\Gamma=(X,E)$ with adjacency matrix $A$, $d+1$ distinct eigenvalues, and diameter $D$, we give a characterization of when its distance matrix $A_D$ is a polynomial in $A$, in terms of the adjacency…

We collect some results in combinatorial geometry that follow from an inequality of Langer in algebraic geometry. Langer's inequality gives a lower bound on the number of incidences between a point set and its spanned lines, and was…

A finite set X in the d-dimensional Euclidean space is called an s-distance set if the set of Euclidean distances between any two distinct points of X has size s. Larman--Rogers--Seidel proved that if the cardinality of a two-distance set…

A set in $\mathbb R^d$ is called almost-equidistant if for any three distinct points in the set, some two are at unit distance apart. First, we give a short proof of the result of Bezdek and L\'angi claiming that an almost-equidistant set…

Let $d \geq 2$ be a natural number. We show that $$|A-A| \geq \left(2d-2 + \frac{1}{d-1}\right)|A|-(2d^2-4d+3)$$ for any sufficiently large finite subset $A$ of $\mathbb{R}^d$ that is not contained in a translate of a hyperplane. By a…

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…

The Brunn-Minkowski inequality, applicable to bounded measurable sets $A$ and $B$ in $\mathbb{R}^d$, states that $|A+B|^{1/d} \geq |A|^{1/d}+|B|^{1/d}$. Equality is achieved if and only if $A$ and $B$ are convex and homothetic sets in…

Given a set $S$ consisting of $n$ points in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and one or two vantage points, we study the number of orderings of $S$ induced by measuring the distance (for one vantage point) or the average distance (for two vantage points)…

Let $S$ be a set of points in $\mathbb{R}^2$ contained in a circle and $P$ an unrestricted point set in $\mathbb{R}^2$. We prove the number of distinct distances between points in $S$ and points in $P$ is at least…