Families of paths in the plane that connect all point pairs (Q1199232)

A path in the plane is a subspace \(S\) which is homeomorphic to the closed unit interval. A family of paths in the plane is called a mesh, if every pair of distinct points in the plane coincides with the endpoints of some suitable member of this family. A point \(p\in R^ 2\) is called crossing point of a mesh \(M\), if there are two distinct paths \(S_ 1,S_ 2 \in M\) for which \(p\) is an interior point. If \(S_ 1,S_ 2\) are uniqely defined by this property, then the crossing point \(p\) is called simple. A simple mesh is a mesh all of whose crossing points are simple. Roughly speaking, the author shows that a subset of the plane is the crossing set of a mesh if and only if it is dense in the plane. He also constructs a mesh with only simple crossing points whose crossing set is meager and has measure zero. Furthermore he constructs a mesh with countable crossing set whose paths have pairwise finite intersection. It is shown that in such a mesh there can be no bound on the size of these intersections. The author's emphasis is on constructive methods.