Related papers: An explicit lower bound for the unit distance prob…
We first describe a reduction from the problem of lower-bounding the number of distinct distances determined by a set $S$ of $s$ points in the plane to an incidence problem between points and a certain class of helices (or parabolas) in…
New bounds on the number of similar or directly similar copies of a pattern within a finite subset of the line or the plane are proved. The number of equilateral triangles whose vertices all lie within an $n$-point subset of the plane is…
Let $T(n)$ denote the maximum number of unit distances that a set of $n$ points in the Euclidean plane $\mathbb{R}^2$ can determine with the additional condition that the distinct unit length directions determined by the configuration must…
The Ulam distance of two permutations on $[n]$ is $n$ minus the length of their longest common subsequence. In this paper, we show that for every $\varepsilon>0$, there exists some $\alpha>0$, and an infinite set $\Gamma\subseteq…
We study a generalization of Erd\H os's unit distances problem to chains of $k$ distances. Given $\mathcal P,$ a set of $n$ points, and a sequence of distances $(\delta_1,\ldots,\delta_k)$, we study the maximum possible number of tuples of…
The Erd\H{o}s distinct distance problem is a ubiquitous problem in discrete geometry. Less well known is Erd\H{o}s' distinct angle problem, the problem of finding the minimum number of distinct angles between $n$ non-collinear points in the…
We obtain new upper and lower bounds on the number of unit perimeter triangles spanned by points in the plane. We also establish improved bounds in the special case where the point set is a section of the integer grid.
We study a family of variants of Erd\H os' unit distance problem, concerning distances and dot products between pairs of points chosen from a large finite point set. Specifically, given a large finite set of $n$ points $E$, we look for…
Given two points in the plane, and a set of "obstacles" given as curves through the plane with assigned weights, we consider the point-separation problem, which asks for the minimum-weight subset of the obstacles separating the two points.…
We consider the number of distinct distances between two finite sets of points in ${\bf R}^k$, for any constant dimension $k\ge 2$, where one set $P_1$ consists of $n$ points on a line $l$, and the other set $P_2$ consists of $m$ arbitrary…
A celebrated unit distance conjecture due to Erd\H os says that that the unit distances cannot arise more than $C_{\epsilon}n^{1+\epsilon}$ times (for any $\epsilon>0$) among $n$ points in the Euclidean plane (see e.g. \cite{SST84} and the…
We derive a new estimate of the size of finite sets of points in metric spaces with few distances. The following applications are considered: (1) we improve the Ray-Chaudhuri--Wilson bound of the size of uniform intersecting families of…
In this note, we show that in planar pointsets determining many unit distances, these unit distances must span many directions. Specifically, we show that a set of $n$ points can determine only $o(n^{4/3})$ unit distances from a set of at…
An old question posed by Erd\H{o}s asked whether there exists a set of $n$ points such that $c \cdot n$ distances occur more than $n$ times. We provide an affirmative answer to this question, showing that there exists a set of $n$ points…
A homogeneous set of $n$ points in the $d$-dimensional Euclidean space determines at least $\Omega(n^{2d/(d^2+1)} / \log^{c(d)} n)$ distinct distances for a constant $c(d)>0$. In three-space, we slightly improve our general bound and show…
Let $d_1\leq d_2\leq\ldots\leq d_{n\choose 2}$ denote the distances determined by $n$ points in the plane. It is shown that $\min\sum_i (d_{i+1}-d_i)^2=O(n^{-6/7})$, where the minimum is taken over all point sets with minimal distance $d_1…
We show that the number of unit distances determined by n points in R^3 is O(n^{3/2}), slightly improving the bound of Clarkson et al. established in 1990. The new proof uses the recently introduced polynomial partitioning technique of Guth…
Suppose $\left\{x_1, \dots, x_n\right\} \subset \mathbb{R}^2$ is a set of $n$ points in the plane with diameter $\leq 1$, meaning $\|x_i - x_j\| \leq 1$ for all $1 \leq i,j \leq n$. We show that if there are many `antipodes', these are…
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}…
In this paper, using the compression method, we recover the lower bound for the Erd\H{o}s unit distance problem and provide an alternative proof to the distinct distance conjecture. In particular, in $\mathbb{R}^k$ for all $k\geq 2$, we…