44 research outputs found
On the Richter-Thomassen Conjecture about Pairwise Intersecting Closed Curves
A long standing conjecture of Richter and Thomassen states that the total
number of intersection points between any simple closed Jordan curves in
the plane, so that any pair of them intersect and no three curves pass through
the same point, is at least .
We confirm the above conjecture in several important cases, including the
case (1) when all curves are convex, and (2) when the family of curves can be
partitioned into two equal classes such that each curve from the first class is
touching every curve from the second class. (Two curves are said to be touching
if they have precisely one point in common, at which they do not properly
cross.)
An important ingredient of our proofs is the following statement: Let be
a family of the graphs of continuous real functions defined on
, no three of which pass through the same point. If there are
pairs of touching curves in , then the number of crossing points is
.Comment: To appear in SODA 201
The number of tangencies between two families of curves
We prove that the number of tangencies between the members of two families,
each of which consists of pairwise disjoint curves, can be as large as
. We show that from a conjecture about forbidden -
matrices it would follow that this bound is sharp for doubly-grounded families.
We also show that if the curves are required to be -monotone, then the
maximum number of tangencies is , which improves a result by
Pach, Suk, and Treml. Finally, we also improve the best known bound on the
number of tangencies between the members of a family of at most
-intersecting curves
Beyond the Richter-Thomassen conjecture
If two closed Jordan curves in the plane have precisely one point in common, then it is called a touching point-All other intersection points are called crossing points. The main result of this paper is a Crossing Lemma for closed curves: In any family of n pairwise intersecting simple closed curves in the plane, no three of which pass through the same point, the number of crossing points exceeds the number of touching points by a factor of fK(loglogn)1/8). As a corollary, we prove the following long-standing conjecture of Richter and Thomassen: The total number of intersection points between any n pairwise intersecting simple closed curves in the plane, no three of which pass through the same point, is at least (1 - o(l))n2
A Crossing Lemma for Jordan curves
If two Jordan curves in the plane have precisely one point in common, and there they do not properly cross, then the common point is called a touching point. The main result of this paper is a Crossing Lemma for simple curves: Let X and T stand for the sets of intersection points and touching points, respectively, in a family of n simple curves in the plane, no three of which pass through the same point. If |T|>cn, for some fixed constant c>0, then we prove that |X|=Ω(|T|(logâĄlogâĄ(|T|/n))1/504). In particular, if |T|/nââ then the number of intersection points is much larger than the number of touching points. As a corollary, we confirm the following long-standing conjecture of Richter and Thomassen: The total number of intersection points between n pairwise intersecting simple closed (i.e., Jordan) curves in the plane, no three of which pass through the same point, is at least (1âo(1))n2. © 201
On Minimizing Crossings in Storyline Visualizations
In a storyline visualization, we visualize a collection of interacting
characters (e.g., in a movie, play, etc.) by -monotone curves that converge
for each interaction, and diverge otherwise. Given a storyline with
characters, we show tight lower and upper bounds on the number of crossings
required in any storyline visualization for a restricted case. In particular,
we show that if (1) each meeting consists of exactly two characters and (2) the
meetings can be modeled as a tree, then we can always find a storyline
visualization with crossings. Furthermore, we show that there
exist storylines in this restricted case that require
crossings. Lastly, we show that, in the general case, minimizing the number of
crossings in a storyline visualization is fixed-parameter tractable, when
parameterized on the number of characters . Our algorithm runs in time
, where is the number of meetings.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures. To appear at the 23rd International Symposium on
Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2015
Discrete Geometry
A number of important recent developments in various branches of discrete geometry were presented at the workshop. The presentations illustrated both the diversity of the area and its strong connections to other fields of mathematics such as topology, combinatorics or algebraic geometry. The open questions abound and many of the results presented were obtained by young researchers, confirming the great vitality of discrete geometry