Simply connected orthogonal polygons as unions of two orthogonally starshaped sets (Q2573753)

An orthogonal polygon in the plane is one which has every edge parallel to one or the other of the coordinate axes, and a staircase path is a directed polygonal path in which edges alternate between a specified horizontal direction and a specified vertical direction. The latter notion gives rise in the obvious way to the notions of ``orthogonally convex'' and ``orthogonally starshaped'' sets. (This geometry figures in beginners' Etch-A-Sketch drawings, and more importantly in printed circuits and circuit boards.) The main result of this paper characterizes the simply connected orthogonal polygons in the plane that are the union of two orthogonally starshaped sets as those with the property that two out of every three points of the set see a common point via staircase paths (one might say they are ``orthogonally 3-starshaped''). It is shown that the corresponding result does not hold for visibility via segments, and that simple connectivity is essential. Reviewer's note: Without minimizing the importance of orthogonal polygons and staircase paths, we note that this result may be placed in a more general context. Any planar body (i.e., set which is the closure of its own interior) may be approximated ``from within'' by orthogonal polygons, and the result may thus be extended to simply connected planar bodies. Moreover, two points within a body can see each other via a staircase path if and only if they can see each other via a path \((f(t),g(t))\) where \(f\) and \(g\) are monotone functions. Such a path is, equivalently, a geodesic of the taxicab metric. Note that this is a weaker definition of visibility than was used in [\textit{V. Boltyanski}, \textit{H. Martini} and \textit{P. S. Soltan}, Discrete Comput. Geom. 15, No. 1, 63--71 (1996; Zbl 0847.52003)]. Can we drop the condition that the set is a body?