On the Number of Arrangements of Pseudolines

Given a simple arrangement of n pseudolines in the Euclidean plane, associate with line i the list σ _i of the lines crossing i in the order of the crossings on line i. is a permutation of . The vector (σ ₁ ,σ ₂ , ...,σ_n) is an encoding for the arrangement. Define if and , otherwise. Let , we show that the vector (τ ₁ , τ ₂ , ... , τ_n) is already an encoding. We use this encoding to improve the upper bound on the number of arrangements of n pseudolines to . Moreover, we have enumerated arrangements with 10 pseudolines. As a byproduct we determine their exact number and we can show that the maximal number of halving lines of 10 point in the plane is 13. Received December 20, 1995, and in revised form March 8, 1996.