English

Colorful two-piercing theorem for boxes

Computational Geometry 2025-12-17 v3 Combinatorics

Abstract

We prove a colorful extension of a Helly-type theorem by Danzer and Gr\"{u}nbaum (Combinatorica, 1982) concerning two-piercing families of axis-parallel boxes in Rd\mathbb{R}^d. We also show that our result is tight by constructing extremal families that achieve the bound. Related work includes a graph-theoretic proof of the original theorem by Pendavingh, Puite, and Woeginger (Discrete Applied Mathematics, 2008), and a two-piercing result for lower-dimensional boxes by Ba\~{n}os and Oliveros (Acta Mathematica Hungarica, 2018).

Cite

@article{arxiv.2207.14368,
  title  = {Colorful two-piercing theorem for boxes},
  author = {Sourav Chakraborty and Arijit Ghosh and Soumi Nandi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.14368},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Major revision. Large parts of the paper have been rewritten to improve clarity and presentation. The two-piercing result is retained, while the material on three-piercing has been removed. This paper will appear in Discrete Applied Mathematics

R2 v1 2026-06-25T01:19:04.552Z