Convex polygons are self-coverable (Q741609)

Given a triangle \(S\) in the plane, the authors prove that for every set \(P\) of \(k\) points belonging to \(S\), it is possible to find a collection \(\mathcal{S}'\) of at most \(2k+1\) homothetic copies of \(S\) such that the union of them is \(S\) but no point of \(P\) is in the interior of a triangle from \(\mathcal{S}'\). Similar results are also proved for a square with \(2k+2\) homothetic copies of it, and for a convex polygon \(C\) with a number \(f(k)\leq ck\) of homothetic copies of \(C\) (the constant \(c\) depends only on \(C\), but not only on the number of vertices because it can be arbitrarily big even for a quadrangle). Using the definition of \textit{self-coverable} family of sets introduced by the authors, the above results mean that the family formed by homothets of a given triangle is self-coverable with self-coverability function \(f(k)=2k+1\), and the homothets of a square or a polygon are self-coverable families with \(f(k)\) equal to \(2k+2\) and to \(ck\), respectively. Let us consider a family of closed sets \(\mathcal{S}\) and a finite set of points \(P\) colored with \(k\) colors. Let \(m_k\) be the minimum number to be sure that every member of the family \(\mathcal{S}\) which contains \(m_k\) points from the set \(P\) always contains the \(k\) colors. If \(\mathcal{S}\) is self-coverable with a monotone self-coverability function \(f(k)>k\), Theorem 2 in the paper enables to estimate \(m_k\) from \(m_2\) and \(f\). As a consequence, some estimations for \(m_k\) are obtained when \(\mathcal{S}\) is the family of homothets of a triangle and homothets of a square. The authors suggest to study if \(m_k=O(k)\) for every self-coverable family.