Crescent configurations in normed spaces

MaRDI QIDQ5148786zbMATH OpenFDO

Authors Sara Fish, Dylan A. King, Steven J. Miller, Catherine Wahlenmayer, Eyvindur Ari Palsson

Publication date 5 February 2021

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.08769, http://math.colgate.edu/~integers/u96/u96.pdf

zbMATH Keywords

crescent configurationsgeneral normed spaces

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Erd?s problems and related topics of discrete geometry (52C10)

Abstract: We study the problem of crescent configurations, posed by ErdH{o}s in 1989. A crescent configuration is a set of $n$ points in the plane such that: 1) no three points lie on a common line, 2) no four points lie on a common circle, 3) for each $1leqileqn-1$, there exists a distance which occurs exactly $i$ times. Constructions of sizes $nleq8$ have been provided by Liu, Pal'{a}sti, and Pomerance. ErdH{o}s conjectured that there exists some $N$ for which there do not exist crescent configurations of size $n$ for all $ngeqN$. We extend the problem of crescent configurations to general normed spaces $(mathbb{R}^2,|cdot|)$ by studying strong crescent configurations in $|cdot|$. In an arbitrary norm $|cdot|$, we construct a strong crescent configuration of size 4. We also construct larger strong crescent configurations in the Euclidean, taxicab, and Chebyshev norms, of sizes $nleq6$, $nleq8$, and $nleq8$ respectively. When defining strong crescent configurations, we introduce the notion of line-like configurations in $|cdot|$. A line-like configuration in $|cdot|$ is a set of points whose distance graph is isomorphic to the distance graph of equally spaced points on a line. In a broad class of norms, we construct line-like configurations of arbitrary size. Our main result is a crescent-type result about line-like configurations in the Chebyshev norm. A line-like crescent configuration is a line-like configuration for which no three points lie on a common line and no four points lie on a common $|cdot|$ circle. We prove that for $ngeq7$, every line-like crescent configuration of size $n$ in the Chebyshev norm must have a rigid structure. Specifically, it must be a perpendicular perturbation of equally spaced points on a horizontal or vertical line.

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