128 research outputs found
Topological transversals to a family of convex sets
Let be a family of compact convex sets in . We say
that has a \emph{topological -transversal of index }
(, ) if there are, homologically, as many transversal
-planes to as -planes containing a fixed -plane in
.
Clearly, if has a -transversal plane, then
has a topological -transversal of index for and . The converse is not true in general.
We prove that for a family of compact convex sets in
a topological -transversal of index implies an
ordinary -transversal. We use this result, together with the
multiplication formulas for Schubert cocycles, the Lusternik-Schnirelmann
category of the Grassmannian, and different versions of the colorful Helly
theorem by B\'ar\'any and Lov\'asz, to obtain some geometric consequences
Lines pinning lines
A line g is a transversal to a family F of convex polytopes in 3-dimensional
space if it intersects every member of F. If, in addition, g is an isolated
point of the space of line transversals to F, we say that F is a pinning of g.
We show that any minimal pinning of a line by convex polytopes such that no
face of a polytope is coplanar with the line has size at most eight. If, in
addition, the polytopes are disjoint, then it has size at most six. We
completely characterize configurations of disjoint polytopes that form minimal
pinnings of a line.Comment: 27 pages, 10 figure
Line transversals to disjoint balls
We prove that the set of directions of lines intersecting three disjoint
balls in in a given order is a strictly convex subset of . We then
generalize this result to disjoint balls in . 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
Bounding Helly numbers via Betti numbers
We show that very weak topological assumptions are enough to ensure the
existence of a Helly-type theorem. More precisely, we show that for any
non-negative integers and there exists an integer such that
the following holds. If is a finite family of subsets of such that for any
and every
then has Helly number at most . Here
denotes the reduced -Betti numbers (with singular homology). These
topological conditions are sharp: not controlling any of these first Betti numbers allow for families with unbounded Helly number.
Our proofs combine homological non-embeddability results with a Ramsey-based
approach to build, given an arbitrary simplicial complex , some well-behaved
chain map .Comment: 29 pages, 8 figure
Helly numbers of Algebraic Subsets of
We study -convex sets, which are the geometric objects obtained as the
intersection of the usual convex sets in with a proper subset
. We contribute new results about their -Helly
numbers. We extend prior work for , , and ; we give sharp bounds on the -Helly numbers in
several new cases. We considered the situation for low-dimensional and for
sets that have some algebraic structure, in particular when is an
arbitrary subgroup of or when is the difference between a
lattice and some of its sublattices. By abstracting the ingredients of Lov\'asz
method we obtain colorful versions of many monochromatic Helly-type results,
including several colorful versions of our own results.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures. This paper is a revised version of what was
originally the first half of arXiv:1504.00076v
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