601 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
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
Tropical polar cones, hypergraph transversals, and mean payoff games
We discuss the tropical analogues of several basic questions of convex
duality. In particular, the polar of a tropical polyhedral cone represents the
set of linear inequalities that its elements satisfy. We characterize the
extreme rays of the polar in terms of certain minimal set covers which may be
thought of as weighted generalizations of minimal transversals in hypergraphs.
We also give a tropical analogue of Farkas lemma, which allows one to check
whether a linear inequality is implied by a finite family of linear
inequalities. Here, the certificate is a strategy of a mean payoff game. We
discuss examples, showing that the number of extreme rays of the polar of the
tropical cyclic polyhedral cone is polynomially bounded, and that there is no
unique minimal system of inequalities defining a given tropical polyhedral
cone.Comment: 27 pages, 6 figures, revised versio
A Center Transversal Theorem for Hyperplanes and Applications to Graph Drawing
Motivated by an open problem from graph drawing, we study several
partitioning problems for line and hyperplane arrangements. We prove a
ham-sandwich cut theorem: given two sets of n lines in R^2, there is a line l
such that in both line sets, for both halfplanes delimited by l, there are
n^{1/2} lines which pairwise intersect in that halfplane, and this bound is
tight; a centerpoint theorem: for any set of n lines there is a point such that
for any halfplane containing that point there are (n/3)^{1/2} of the lines
which pairwise intersect in that halfplane. We generalize those results in
higher dimension and obtain a center transversal theorem, a same-type lemma,
and a positive portion Erdos-Szekeres theorem for hyperplane arrangements. This
is done by formulating a generalization of the center transversal theorem which
applies to set functions that are much more general than measures. Back to
Graph Drawing (and in the plane), we completely solve the open problem that
motivated our search: there is no set of n labelled lines that are universal
for all n-vertex labelled planar graphs. As a side note, we prove that every
set of n (unlabelled) lines is universal for all n-vertex (unlabelled) planar
graphs
Notes about the Caratheodory number
In this paper we give sufficient conditions for a compactum in
to have Carath\'{e}odory number less than , generalizing an old result of
Fenchel. Then we prove the corresponding versions of the colorful
Carath\'{e}odory theorem and give a Tverberg type theorem for families of
convex compacta
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