An infinite sequence of non-realizable weavings (Q2565861)

A weaving is a collection of lines drawn in the plane so that (i) no three lines intersect, and (ii) when two lines intersect at a point, it is specified which of the two lines is above the other. A weaving is realizable if it is the projection onto a plane of a collection of pairwise skew lines in the 3-space, where the projection respects aboveness. A subweaving is obtained by deleting some lines. The paper under review solves a problem posed by \textit{J. Pach, R. Pollack,} and \textit{E. Welzl} on page 562 of [Algorithmica 9, 561--571 (1993; Zbl 0788.68146)]. Specifically, the authors prove that if \(n \geq 4\), then there is a non-realizable weaving of \(n\) lines such that all of its proper subweavings are realizable. The authors remark that this result disproves the conjecture, motivated by Kuratowski's description of non-planar graphs, that there exists a finite collection of nonrealizable weavings \(L_1, \dots, L_n\) such that every nonrealizable weaving contains some \(L_i\) as a subweaving. They also give an informal physical interpretation of their result.