Finding Sets of Points without Empty Convex 6-Gons

   Abstract. Erd?s asked whether every large enough set of points in general position in the plane contains six points that form a convex 6-gon without any points from the set in its interior. In this note we show how a set of 29 points was found that contains no empty convex 6-gon. To this end a fast incremental algorithm for finding such 6-gons was designed and implemented and a heuristic search approach was used to find promising sets. The experiments also led to two observations that might be useful in proving that large sets always contain an empty convex 6-gon.     

Finding Convex Sets Among Points in the Plane

Let g(n) denote the least value such that any g(n) points in the plane in general position contain the vertices of a convex n -gon. In 1935, Erdős and Szekeres showed that g(n) exists, and they obtained the bounds Chung and Graham have recently improved the upper bound by 1; the first improvement since the original Erdős—Szekeres paper. We show that <lsiheader> <onlinepub>26 June, 1998 <editor>Editors-in-Chief: &lsilt;a href=../edboard.html#chiefs&lsigt;Jacob E. Goodman, Richard Pollack&lsilt;/a&lsigt; <pdfname>19n3p405.pdf <pdfexist>yes <htmlexist>no <htmlfexist>no <texexist>yes <sectionname> </lsiheader> Received January 1, 1997, and in revised form June 6, 1997.     

Finding Convex Sets in Convex Position

Let F{\cal{F}} denote a family of pairwise disjoint convex sets in the plane. F{\cal{F}} is said to be in convex position, if none of its members is contained in the convex hull of the union of the others. For any fixed k 3 5k\ge5, we give a linear upper bound on P_k(n)P_k(n), the maximum size of a family F{\cal{F}} with the property that any k members of F{\cal{F}} are in convex position, but no n are.     

Empty Convex Hexagons in Planar Point Sets

Erdős asked whether every sufficiently large set of points in general position in the plane contains six points that form a convex hexagon without any points from the set in its interior. Such a configuration is called an empty convex hexagon. In this paper, we answer the question in the affirmative. We show that every set that contains the vertex set of a convex 9-gon also contains an empty convex hexagon.     

Forced Convex n -Gons in the Plane

In a seminal paper from 1935, Erdős and Szekeres showed that for each n there exists a least value g(n) such that any subset of g(n) points in the plane in general position must always contain the vertices of a convex n -gon. In particular, they obtained the bounds which have stood unchanged since then. In this paper we remove the +1 from the upper bound for n ≥ 4 . <lsiheader> <onlinepub>26 June, 1998 <editor>Editors-in-Chief: &lsilt;a href=../edboard.html#chiefs&lsigt;Jacob E. Goodman, Richard Pollack&lsilt;/a&lsigt; <pdfname>19n3p367.pdf <pdfexist>yes <htmlexist>no <htmlfexist>no <texexist>yes <sectionname> </lsiheader> Received January 1, 1997, and in revised form June 6, 1997.     

Reconstructing Boundary Points of Convex Sets from X-ray Pictures

A method for the reconstruction of boundary points of convex sets is provided starting from three X-ray pictures in two orthogonal directions and from a point.     

Representation of Bounded Convex Sets By Rational Convex Hull Of Its Gamma-Extreme Points

H. Minkowski proved C= convext C whenever C is a compact convex subset of a finite-dimensional linear space. If C is bounded but not closed, this representation does not hold anymore. In this case, we introduce the set of so-called γ-extreme points extγC of C and show C = convext γ C = raco extγ C, where raco M denotes the rational convex hull of M.     

Random Walks On Finite Convex Sets Of Lattice Points

This paper examines the convergence of nearest-neighbor random walks on convex subsets of the lattices^d. The main result shows that for fixedd, O(²) steps are sufficient for a walk to get random, where is the diameter of the set. Toward this end a new definition of convexity is introduced for subsets of lattices, which has many important properties of the concept of convexity in Euclidean spaces.     

Constructible Convex Sets

We investigate when closed convex sets can be written as countable intersections of closed half-spaces in Banach spaces. It is reasonable to consider this class to comprise the constructible convex sets since such sets are precisely those that can be defined by a countable number of linear inequalities, hence are accessible to techniques of semi-infinite convex programming. We also explore some model theoretic implications. Applications to set convergence are given as limiting examples.     

Translating Finite Sets into Convex Sets

Let X be a reflexive Banach space, and let C X be a closed,convex and bounded set with empty interior. Then, for every > 0, there is a nonempty finite set F X with an arbitrarilysmall diameter, such that C contains at most .|F| points ofany translation of F. As a corollary, a separable Banach spaceX is reflexive if and only if every closed convex subset ofX with empty interior is Haar null. 2000 Mathematics SubjectClassification 46B20 (primary), 28C20 (secondary).     

Extremal Convex Planar Sets

Each convex planar set K has a perimeter C, a minimum width E, an area A, and a diameter D. The set of points (E,C, A^1/2, D) corresponding to all such sets is shown to occupy a cone in the non-negative orthant of R⁴with its vertex at the origin. Its three-dimensional cross section S in the plane D = 1 is investigated. S lies in a rectangular parallelepiped in R³. Results of Lebesgue, Kubota, Fukasawa, Sholander, and Hemmi are used to determine some of the boundary surfaces of S, and new results are given for the other boundary surfaces. From knowledge of S, all inequalities among E, C ,A, and D can be found.     

New Combinations of Convex Sets

The family of convex sets in a (finite dimensional) real vector space admits several unary and binary operations – dilatation, intersection, convex hull, vector sum – which preserve convexity. These generalize to convex functions, where there are in fact further operations of this kind. Some of the latter may be regarded as combinations of two such operations, acting on complementary subspaces. In this paper, a general theory of such mixed operations is introduced, and some of its consequences developed.     

Self-Concordant Barriers for Convex Approximations of Structured Convex Sets

We show how to approximate the feasible region of structured convex optimization problems by a family of convex sets with explicitly given and efficient (if the accuracy of the approximation is moderate) self-concordant barriers. This approach extends the reach of the modern theory of interior-point methods, and lays the foundation for new ways to treat structured convex optimization problems with a very large number of constraints. Moreover, our approach provides a strong connection from the theory of self-concordant barriers to the combinatorial optimization literature on solving packing and covering problems.     

Pebble Sets in Convex Polygons

Lukács and András posed the problem of showing the existence of a set of n−2 points in the interior of a convex n-gon so that the interior of every triangle determined by three vertices of the polygon contains a unique point of S. Such sets have been called pebble sets by De Loera, Peterson, and Su. We seek to characterize all such sets for any given convex polygon in the plane. We first consider a certain class of pebble sets, called peripheral because they consist of points that lie close to the boundary of the polygon. We characterize all peripheral pebble sets, and show that for regular polygons, these are the only ones. Though we demonstrate examples of polygons where there are other pebble sets, we nevertheless provide a characterization of the kinds of points that can be involved in non-peripheral pebble sets. We furthermore describe algorithms to find such points.     

Convex Sets in Acyclic Digraphs

A non-empty set X of vertices of an acyclic digraph is called connected if the underlying undirected graph induced by X is connected and it is called convex if no two vertices of X are connected by a directed path in which some vertices are not in X. The set of convex sets (connected convex sets) of an acyclic digraph D is denoted by and its size by co(D) (cc(D)). Gutin et al. (2008) conjectured that the sum of the sizes of all convex sets (connected convex sets) in D equals Θ(n · co(D)) (Θ(n · cc(D))) where n is the order of D. In this paper we exhibit a family of connected acyclic digraphs with and . We also show that the number of connected convex sets of order k in any connected acyclic digraph of order n is at least n − k + 1. This is a strengthening of a theorem of Gutin and Yeo.     

Intersecting Convex Sets by Rays

What is the smallest number τ=τ(n) such that for any collection of n pairwise disjoint convex sets in d-dimensional Euclidean space, there is a point such that any ray (half-line) emanating from it meets at most τ sets of the collection? This question of Urrutia is closely related to the notion of regression depth introduced by Rousseeuw and Hubert (1996). We show the following:Given any collection \({\mathcal{C}}\) of n pairwise disjoint compact convex sets in d-dimensional Euclidean space, there exists a point p such that any ray emanating from p meets at most \(\frac{dn+1}{d+1}\) members of \({\mathcal{C}}\).There exist collections of n pairwise disjoint (i) equal-length segments or (ii) disks in the Euclidean plane such that from any point there is a ray that meets at least \(\frac{2n}{3}-2\) of them.We also determine the asymptotic behavior of τ(n) when the convex bodies are fat and of roughly equal size.     

Noncommutative Polynomials Describing Convex Sets

Foundations of Computational Mathematics - The free closed semialgebraic set $${mathcal {D}}_f$$ determined by a hermitian noncommutative polynomial $$fin {text {M}}_{{delta }}({mathbb...     

Canonical Theorems for Convex Sets

Let F be a family of pairwise disjoint compact convex sets in the plane such that none of them is contained in the convex hull of two others, and let r be a positive integer. We show that F has r disjoint ⌊ c _r n⌋ -membered subfamilies F _i (1 ≤ i ≤ r) such that no matter how we pick one element F _i from each F _i , they are in convex position, i.e., every F _i appears on the boundary of the convex hull of ⋃ _i=1 ^r F _i . (Here c _r is a positive constant depending only on r .) This generalizes and sharpens some results of Erdős and Szekeres, Bisztriczky and Fejes Tóth, Bárány and Valtr, and others. <lsiheader> <onlinepub>26 June, 1998 <editor>Editors-in-Chief: &lsilt;a href=../edboard.html#chiefs&lsigt;Jacob E. Goodman, Richard Pollack&lsilt;/a&lsigt; <pdfname>19n3p427.pdf <pdfexist>yes <htmlexist>no <htmlfexist>no <texexist>yes <sectionname> </lsiheader> Received April 30, 1997, and in revised form August 5, 1997.