Making Triangles Colorful

We prove that for any point set P in the plane, a triangle T, and a positive integer k, there exists a coloring of P with k colors such that any homothetic copy of T containing at least ck^8 points of P, for some constant c, contains at least one of each color. This is the first polynomial bound for range spaces induced by homothetic polygons. The only previously known bound for this problem applies to the more general case of octants in R^3, but is doubly exponential.Comment: 6 page

More on Decomposing Coverings by Octants

In this note we improve our upper bound given earlier by showing that every 9-fold covering of a point set in the space by finitely many translates of an octant decomposes into two coverings, and our lower bound by a construction for a 4-fold covering that does not decompose into two coverings. The same bounds also hold for coverings of points in $\R^2$ by finitely many homothets or translates of a triangle. We also prove that certain dynamic interval coloring problems are equivalent to the above question

Density of Range Capturing Hypergraphs

For a finite set $X$ of points in the plane, a set $S$ in the plane, and a positive integer $k$, we say that a $k$-element subset $Y$ of $X$ is captured by $S$ if there is a homothetic copy $S'$ of $S$ such that $X\cap S' = Y$, i.e., $S'$ contains exactly $k$ elements from $X$. A $k$-uniform $S$-capturing hypergraph $H = H(X,S,k)$ has a vertex set $X$ and a hyperedge set consisting of all $k$-element subsets of $X$ captured by $S$. In case when $k=2$ and $S$ is convex these graphs are planar graphs, known as convex distance function Delaunay graphs. In this paper we prove that for any $k\geq 2$, any $X$, and any convex compact set $S$, the number of hyperedges in $H(X,S,k)$ is at most $(2k-1)|X| - k^2 + 1 - \sum_{i=1}^{k-1}a_i$, where $a_i$ is the number of $i$-element subsets of $X$ that can be separated from the rest of $X$ with a straight line. In particular, this bound is independent of $S$ and indeed the bound is tight for all "round" sets $S$ and point sets $X$ in general position with respect to $S$. This refines a general result of Buzaglo, Pinchasi and Rote stating that every pseudodisc topological hypergraph with vertex set $X$ has $O(k^2|X|)$ hyperedges of size $k$ or less.Comment: new version with a tight result and shorter proo

Unsplittable coverings in the plane

A system of sets forms an {\em $m$-fold covering} of a set $X$ if every point of $X$ belongs to at least $m$ of its members. A $1$-fold covering is called a {\em covering}. The problem of splitting multiple coverings into several coverings was motivated by classical density estimates for {\em sphere packings} as well as by the {\em planar sensor cover problem}. It has been the prevailing conjecture for 35 years (settled in many special cases) that for every plane convex body $C$, there exists a constant $m=m(C)$ such that every $m$-fold covering of the plane with translates of $C$ splits into $2$ coverings. In the present paper, it is proved that this conjecture is false for the unit disk. The proof can be generalized to construct, for every $m$, an unsplittable $m$-fold covering of the plane with translates of any open convex body $C$ which has a smooth boundary with everywhere {\em positive curvature}. Somewhat surprisingly, {\em unbounded} open convex sets $C$ do not misbehave, they satisfy the conjecture: every $3$-fold covering of any region of the plane by translates of such a set $C$ splits into two coverings. To establish this result, we prove a general coloring theorem for hypergraphs of a special type: {\em shift-chains}. We also show that there is a constant $c>0$ such that, for any positive integer $m$, every $m$-fold covering of a region with unit disks splits into two coverings, provided that every point is covered by {\em at most} $c2^{m/2}$ sets

Proper Coloring of Geometric Hypergraphs

We study whether for a given planar family F there is an m such that any finite set of points can be 3-colored so that anymember ofF that contains at leastm points contains two points with different colors. We conjecture that if F is a family of pseudo-disks, then such an m exists. We prove this in the special case when F is the family of all homothetic copies of a given convex polygon. We also study the problem in higher dimensions

An abstract approach to polychromatic coloring: shallow hitting sets in ABA-free hypergraphs and pseudohalfplanes

The goal of this paper is to give a new, abstract approach to cover-decomposition and polychromatic colorings using hypergraphs on ordered vertex sets. We introduce an abstract version of a framework by Smorodinsky and Yuditsky, used for polychromatic coloring halfplanes, and apply it to so-called ABA-free hypergraphs, which are a generalization of interval graphs. Using our methods, we prove that (2k-1)-uniform ABA-free hypergraphs have a polychromatic k-coloring, a problem posed by the second author. We also prove the same for hypergraphs defined on a point set by pseudohalfplanes. These results are best possible. We could only prove slightly weaker results for dual hypergraphs defined by pseudohalfplanes, and for hypergraphs defined by pseudohemispheres. We also introduce another new notion that seems to be important for investigating polychromatic colorings and epsilon-nets, shallow hitting sets. We show that all the above hypergraphs have shallow hitting sets, if their hyperedges are containment-free

Survey on Decomposition of Multiple Coverings

The study of multiple coverings was initiated by Davenport and L. Fejes Tóth more than 50 years ago. In 1980 and 1986, the rst named author published the rst papers about decompos-ability of multiple coverings. It was discovered much later that, besides its theoretical interest, this area has practical applications to sensor networks. Now there is a lot of activity in this eld with several breakthrough results, although, many basic questions are still unsolved. In this survey, we outline the most important results, methods, and questions. 1 Cover-decomposability and the sensor cover problem Let P = { Pi | i ∈ I} be a collection of sets in Rd. We say that P is an m-fold covering if every point of Rd is contained in at least m members of P. The largest such m is called the thickness of the covering. A 1-fold covering is simply called a covering. To formulate the central question of this survey succinctly, we need a denition. Denition 1.1. A planar set P is said to be cover-decomposable if there exists a (minimal) constant m = m(P) such that every m-fold covering of the plane with translates of P can be decomposed into two coverings. Note that the above term is slightly misleading: we decompose (partition) not the set P, but a collection P of its translates. Such a partition is sometimes regarded a coloring of the members of P

Coloring Points with Respect to Squares

We consider the problem of 2-coloring geometric hypergraphs. Specifically, we show that there is a constant m such that any finite set of points in the plane (Formula presented.) can be 2-colored such that every axis-parallel square that contains at least m points from (Formula presented.) contains points of both colors. Our proof is constructive, that is, it provides a polynomial-time algorithm for obtaining such a 2-coloring. By affine transformations this result immediately applies also when considering 2-coloring points with respect to homothets of a fixed parallelogram