About an Erdős-Grünbaum conjecture concerning piercing of non-bounded convex sets

Abstract: In this paper, we study the number of compact sets needed in an infinite family of convex sets with a local intersection structure to imply a bound on its piercing number, answering a conjecture of ErdH{o}s and Gr"unbaum. Namely, if in an infinite family of convex sets in

m a t h b b R^{d}

we know that out of every

p

there are

q

which are intersecting, we determine if having some compact sets implies a bound on the number of points needed to intersect the whole family. We also study variations of this problem.

Review text

The paper investigates versions of Helly's Theorem for infinitely many sets. The \textit{piercing number} of a family of sets is the smallest size of a set that intersects all of them. The piercing number is considered infinite, if no such finite set exists. A family of sets is said to satisfy the \((p,q)\)-property, if it has at least \(p\) sets, and for any \(p\) of its sets, there is a subfamily of \(q\) sets of those \(p\) sets, which has piercing number one. \textit{N. Alon} and \textit{D. J. Kleitman} [Adv. Math. 96, No. 1, 103--112 (1992; Zbl 0768.52001)] proved the so-called \((p,q)\) theorem: Given positive integers \(p\geq q\geq d+1\), there is a constant \(c=c(p,q,d)\) such that every finite family \(\mathcal F\) of closed convex sets in \(\mathbb{R}^d\) with the \((p,q)\)-property has piercing number at most \(c\). The main result of the paper is the following extension of the \((p,q)\)-theorem: Given positive integers \(p\geq q\geq d+1\), (i) if \(q\geq p-q+(d+1) \) and \(\mathcal F\) is a family of closed convex sets in \(\mathbb{R}^d\) containing at least \(p-q+1\) bounded members and satisfying the \((p,q)\)-property, then the piercing number of \(\mathcal F\) is at most \(\xi(q-1,d,d-1)\xi(p,q,d)+p-q+1\), where \(\xi(a,b,d)\) is the least possible value of \(c(a,b,d)\) in the \((p,q)\)-theorem, and (ii) if \(q< p-q+(d+1) \), then there is a family \(\mathcal F\) of closed convex sets in \(\mathbb{R}^d\), containing infinitely many bounded members, satisfying the \((p,q)\)-property and having infinite piercing number.

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