English

Petruska's question on planar convex sets

Combinatorics 2019-12-18 v1

Abstract

Given 2k12k-1 convex sets in R2R^2 such that no point of the plane is covered by more than kk of the sets, is it true that there are two among the convex sets whose union contains all kk-covered points of the plane? This question due to Gy. Petruska has an obvious affirmative answer for k=1,2,3k=1,2,3; we show here that the claim is also true for k=4k=4, and we present a counterexample for k=5k=5. We explain how Petruska's geometry question fits into the classical hypergraph extremal problems, called arrow problems, proposed by P. Erd\H{o}s.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1912.08080,
  title  = {Petruska's question on planar convex sets},
  author = {Adam S. Jobson and André E. Kézdy and Jenő Lehel and Timothy J. Pervenecki and Géza Tóth},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.08080},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

13 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:48:35.500Z