Construction of minimal bracketing covers for rectangles (Q1010822)

Summary: We construct explicit \(\delta\)-bracketing covers with minimal cardinality for the set system of (anchored) rectangles in the two dimensional unit cube. More precisely, the cardinality of these \(\delta\)-bracketing covers are bounded from above by \(\delta^{-2} + o(\delta^{-2})\). A lower bound for the cardinality of arbitrary \(\delta\)-bracketing covers for \(d\)-dimensional anchored boxes from [\textit{M. Gnewuch}, ''Bracketing numbers for axis-parallel boxes and applications to geometric discrepancy,'' J.Complexity 24, No.\,2, 154--172 (2008; Zbl 1138.11031)] implies the lower bound \(\delta^{-2}+O(\delta^{-1})\) in dimension \(d=2\), showing that our constructed covers are (essentially) optimal. We study also other \(\delta\)-bracketing covers for the set system of rectangles, deduce the coefficient of the most significant term \(\delta^{-2}\) in the asymptotic expansion of their cardinality, and compute their cardinality for explicit values of \(\delta\).