Point transversals to translates of a trapezoid. (Q1880488)

A conjecture of Grünbaum, proved in 2000 by Karasev, states that, in the plane, for any family of translates of a compact convex set, in which every two elements intersect, there is a set of three points intersecting every member of the family (it is 3-piercable or has a 3-transversal). In this paper, the authors give a rather simple proof of the special case when the sets are trapezoids. They also prove the stronger result, for a parallelogram, that if every two translates intersect, so does the entire family. This result (of pure Helly type) is not new, and follows directly from the 1-dimensional case of Helly's theorem upon observing that a parallelogram is (affinely) the Cartesian product of two line segments. It may be difficult to improve on either the brevity or the transparency of existing proofs.