Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0002, South Africa
Abstract:
A hollow axis-aligned box is the boundary of the cartesian product of compact intervals in . We show that for , if any of a collection of hollow axis-aligned boxes have non-empty intersection, then the whole collection has non-empty intersection; and if any of a collection of hollow axis-aligned rectangles in have non-empty intersection, then the whole collection has non-empty intersection. The values for and for are the best possible in general. We also characterize the collections of hollow boxes which would be counterexamples if were lowered to , and to , respectively.