69 research outputs found
Lower Bounds for Pinning Lines by Balls
A line L is a transversal to a family F of convex objects in R^d if it
intersects every member of F. In this paper we show that for every integer d>2
there exists a family of 2d-1 pairwise disjoint unit balls in R^d with the
property that every subfamily of size 2d-2 admits a transversal, yet any line
misses at least one member of the family. This answers a question of Danzer
from 1957
Topology of geometric joins
We consider the geometric join of a family of subsets of the Euclidean space.
This is a construction frequently used in the (colorful) Carath\'eodory and
Tverberg theorems, and their relatives. We conjecture that when the family has
at least sets, where is the dimension of the space, then the
geometric join is contractible. We are able to prove this when equals
and , while for larger we show that the geometric join is contractible
provided the number of sets is quadratic in . We also consider a matroid
generalization of geometric joins and provide similar bounds in this case
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