Distance sets of well-distributed planar sets for polygonal norms (Q2382327)

Let \((X,\| \cdot\| )\) be a two-dimensional normed space with the unit ball \(BX\). For \(A \subset X\) of cardinality \(| A| =N<\infty\), the distance set \(\Delta(A)\) of \(A\) is defined by \[ \Delta(A):= \{\| a-a'\| : a,a' \in A\}. \] The classical Erdős distance problem (1946) concerns the smallest possible cardinality of the distance set \(\Delta(A)\) for a subset \(A\) of \(\mathbb R^2\) with Euclidean norm. Erdős conjectured that \(| \Delta(A)| \geq C \cdot {N \over \sqrt {\log N}}\) for some constant \(C\) and for \(N \geq 2\). The authors mention the well-known results due to \textit{N. H. Katz} and \textit{G. Tardos} [Contemp. Math. 342, 119--126 (2004; Zbl 1069.52017)] and \textit{J. Solymosi} and \textit{Cs. D. Tóth} [Discrete Comput. Geom. 25, No. 4, 629--634 (2001; Zbl 0988.52027)]. The present paper concerns well-distributed sets in any two-dimensional normed linear space \(X\). A set \(S \subset X \) is said to be well-distributed if there is a constant \(K\) such that in every closed ball of radius \(K\) there exists a point of \(S\) (that is, \(S\) is a \(K\)-net for \(X\)). For a positive integer \(N\) and \(A \subset X\), let \[ \Delta_{X,N}(A):=\{\| a-a'\| \leq N : a,a' \in A\}. \] According to the abstract, the authors discuss the question of how large the set of the extremal points of the unit ball \(BX\) may be if \(X\) contains a well-distributed set \(S\) with \(| \Delta_{X,N}(S)| \leq C \cdot N^{{3 \over 2-\varepsilon}}\), and they give a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a well-distributed set \(S\) with \(| \Delta_{X,N}(S)| \leq C \cdot N.\) In fact, in the paper there are several meanings of the expression ``large set'' and this makes the results deap and interesting. In other words, there are several kinds of ``smallness'' of \(\text{Ext} (\partial BX)\) considered, while the title suggests that the boundary of \(BX\) is assumed to be a polygon, that is, \(\text{Ext} (\partial BX)\) is finite. But this is only the simplest case. The other kinds of ``smallness''of \(\text{Ext} (\partial BX)\) are the following: 1. in category: \(\text{Ext} (\partial BX)\) is nowhere dense in the boundary of \(BX\); 2. in measure: \(\text{Ext} (\partial BX)\) has a zero linear measure (or a small Hausdorff dimension); 3. in cardinality: \(\text{Ext} (\partial BX)\) is at most countable.