A transversal property of families of eight or nine unit disks (Q2467004)

A familiy of mutually disjoint translates of a compact convex set in the plane is said to have a common transversal if there exists a (straight) line that intersects all sets of this family. The authors consider families of unit disks in the plane with the property that each \(4\)-element subfamily has a common transversal. They show that for each such family consisting of at most \(9\) disks there is a common transversal of all but at most one disks of the family. For up to \(7\) disks, this has already been verified in a previous paper [the authors, Acta Math. Hung. 106, 285--291 (2005; Zbl 1075.52005)]. The following ``main lemma'' is proved for any positive integer \(n\geq 8\). Let \(\mathcal F\) be a family of \(n\) unit disks with the above mentioned property. If there is a common transversal of \(n-2\) disks of \(\mathcal F\) that strictly separates two elements of \(\mathcal F\), there is also a common transversal of \(n-1\) disks of \(\mathcal F\).