Common transversals

AbstractGiven t families, each family consisting of s finite sets, we show that if the families “separate points” in a natural way, and if the union of all the sets in all the families contains more than (s + 1)t − st−1 − 1 elements, then a common transversal of the t families exists. In case each family is a covering family, the bound is st − st−1. Both of these bounds are best possible. This work extends recent work of Longyear [2]

Common transversals and tangents to two lines and two quadrics in P^3

We solve the following geometric problem, which arises in several three-dimensional applications in computational geometry: For which arrangements of two lines and two spheres in R^3 are there infinitely many lines simultaneously transversal to the two lines and tangent to the two spheres? We also treat a generalization of this problem to projective quadrics: Replacing the spheres in R^3 by quadrics in projective space P^3, and fixing the lines and one general quadric, we give the following complete geometric description of the set of (second) quadrics for which the 2 lines and 2 quadrics have infinitely many transversals and tangents: In the nine-dimensional projective space P^9 of quadrics, this is a curve of degree 24 consisting of 12 plane conics, a remarkably reducible variety.Comment: 26 pages, 9 .eps figures, web page with more pictures and and archive of computations: http://www.math.umass.edu/~sottile/pages/2l2s

Line transversals to disjoint balls

We prove that the set of directions of lines intersecting three disjoint balls in $R^3$ in a given order is a strictly convex subset of $S^2$. We then generalize this result to $n$ disjoint balls in $R^d$. As a consequence, we can improve upon several old and new results on line transversals to disjoint balls in arbitrary dimension, such as bounds on the number of connected components and Helly-type theorems.Comment: 21 pages, includes figure

Geometric Permutations of Non-Overlapping Unit Balls Revisited

Given four congruent balls $A, B, C, D$ in $R^{d}$ that have disjoint interior and admit a line that intersects them in the order $ABCD$, we show that the distance between the centers of consecutive balls is smaller than the distance between the centers of $A$ and $D$. This allows us to give a new short proof that $n$ interior-disjoint congruent balls admit at most three geometric permutations, two if $n\ge 7$. We also make a conjecture that would imply that $n\geq 4$ such balls admit at most two geometric permutations, and show that if the conjecture is false, then there is a counter-example of a highly degenerate nature