Research on Helly-type theorems in combinatorial convex geometry has produced volumetric versions of Helly's theorem using witness sets and quantitative extensions of Doignon's theorem. This paper combines these philosophies and presents quantitative Helly-type theorems for the integer lattice with axis-parallel boxes as witness sets. Our main result shows that, while quantitative Helly numbers for the integer lattice grow polynomially in each fixed dimension, their variants with boxes as witness sets are uniformly bounded. We prove several colorful and fractional variations on this theorem. We also prove that the Helly number for $A \times A \subseteq \mathbb{R}^2$ need not be finite even when $A \subseteq \mathbb{Z}$ is a syndetic set.
Let $\mathcal{F}$ be a family of $n$ axis-parallel boxes in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and $α\in (1-1/d,1]$ a real number. There exists a real number $β(α)>0$ such that if there are $α{n\choose 2}$ intersecting pairs in $\mathcal{F}$, then $\mathcal{F}$ contains an intersecting subfamily of size $βn$. A simple example shows that the above statement is best possible in the sense that if $α\leq 1-1/d$, then there may be no point in $\mathbb{R}^d$ that belongs to more than $d$ elements of $\mathcal{F}$.
We consider quantitative versions of Helly-type questions, that is, instead of finding a point in the intersection, we bound the volume of the intersection. Our first main geometric result is a quantitative version of the Fractional Helly Theorem of Katchalski and Liu, the second one is a quantitative version of the $(p,q)$-Theorem of Alon and Kleitman.
A hollow axis-aligned box is the boundary of the cartesian product of $d$ compact intervals in R^d. We show that for d\geq 3, if any 2^d of a collection of hollow axis-aligned boxes have non-empty intersection, then the whole collection has non-empty intersection; and if any 5 of a collection of hollow axis-aligned rectangles in R^2 have non-empty intersection, then the whole collection has non-empty intersection. The values 2^d for d\geq 3 and 5 for d=2 are the best possible in general. We also characterize the collections of hollow boxes which would be counterexamples if 2^d were lowered to …
This paper presents sixteen quantitative versions of the classic Tverberg, Helly, & Caratheodory theorems in combinatorial convexity. Our results include measurable or enumerable information in the hypothesis and the conclusion. Typical measurements include the volume, the diameter, or the number of points in a lattice.
We introduce a new variant of quantitative Helly-type theorems: the minimal \emph{"homothetic distance"} of the intersection of a family of convex sets to the intersection of a subfamily of a fixed size. As an application, we establish the following quantitative Helly-type result for the \emph{diameter}. If $K$ is the intersection of finitely many convex bodies in $\mathbb{R}^d$, then one can select $2d$ of these bodies whose intersection is of diameter at most $(2d)^3\mathrm{diam}(K)$. The best previously known estimate, due to Brazitikos, is $c d^{11/2}$. Moreover, we confirm that the multip…
The main purpose of this paper is to study extremal results on the intersection graphs of boxes in $\R^d$. We calculate exactly the maximal number of intersecting pairs in a family $\F$ of $n$ boxes in $\R^d$ with the property that no $k+1$ boxes in $\F$ have a point in common. This allows us to improve the known bounds for the fractional Helly theorem for boxes. We also use the Fox-Gromov-Lafforgue-Naor-Pach results to derive a fractional Erdős-Stone theorem for semi-algebraic graphs in order to obtain a second proof of the fractional Helly theorem for boxes.
By extending the definition of boxicity, we extend a Helly-type result given by Danzer and Grumbaum on 2-piercings of family of boxes in $d$-dimensional Euclidian space by lowering the dimension of the boxes in the ambient space.
We prove variations of Carathéodory's, Helly's and Tverberg's theorems where the sets involved are measured according to continuous functions such as the volume or diameter. Among our results, we present continuous quantitative versions of Lovász's colorful Helly theorem, Bárány's colorful Carathéodory's theorem, and the colorful Tverberg theorem.
Given a subset S of R^n, let c(S,k) be the smallest number t such that whenever finitely many convex sets have exactly k common points in S, there exist at most t of these sets that already have exactly k common points in S. For S = Z^n, this number was introduced by Aliev et al. [2014] who gave an explicit bound showing that c(Z^n,k) = O(k) holds for every fixed n. Recently, Chestnut et al. [2015] improved this to c(Z^n,k) = O(k (log log k)(log k)^{-1/3} ) and provided the lower bound c(Z^n,k) = Omega(k^{(n-1)/(n+1)}). We provide a combinatorial description of c(S,k) in terms of polytopes wit…
We prove several exact quantitative versions of Helly's and Tverberg's theorems, which guarantee that a finite family of convex sets in $R^d$ has a large intersection. Our results characterize conditions that are sufficient for the intersection of a family of convex sets to contain a "witness set" which is large under some concave or log-concave measure. The possible witness sets include ellipsoids, zonotopes, and $H$-convex sets. Our results also bound the complexity of finding the best approximation of a family of convex sets by a single zonotope or by a single $H$-convex set. We obtain colo…
We show quantitative versions of classic results in discrete geometry, where the size of a convex set is determined by some non-negative function. We give versions of this kind for the selection theorem of Bárány, the existence of weak epsilon-nets for convex sets and the $(p,q)$ theorem of Alon and Kleitman. These methods can be applied to functions such as the volume, surface area or number of points of a discrete set. We also give general quantitative versions of the colorful Helly theorem for continuous functions.
This paper presents a new variation of Tverberg's theorem. Given a discrete set $S$ of $R^d$, we study the number of points of $S$ needed to guarantee the existence of an $m$-partition of the points such that the intersection of the $m$ convex hulls of the parts contains at least $k$ points of $S$. The proofs of the main results require new quantitative versions of Helly's and Carathéodory's theorems.
The famous Doignon-Bell-Scarf Theorem is a Helly-type result about the existence of integer solutions on systems of linear inequalities. The purpose of this paper is to present the following quantitative generalization: Given an integer $k$, we prove that there exists a constant $c(n,k)$, depending only on the dimension $n$ and $k$, such that if a polyhedron ${x: Ax \leq b}$ contains exactly k integer solutions, then there exists a subset of the rows, of cardinality no more than $c(n,k)$, defining a polyhedron that contains exactly the same $k$ integer points. In this case $c(n,0) = 2^n$ is th…
We show that if A is a large subset of a box in Z^d with dimensions L_1 >= L_2 >= ... >= L_d which are all reasonably large, then |A + A| > 2^{d/48}|A|. By combining this with Chang's quantitative version of Freiman's theorem, we prove a structural result about sets with small sumset. If A is a set of integers with |A + A| <= K|A|, then there is a progression P of dimension d << log K such that |A \cap P| >= \exp(-K^C)max (|A|, |P|). This is closely related to a theorem of Freiman and Bilu, but is quantitatively stronger in certain aspects. [Added Oct 14th: I have temporarily withdrawn this pa…
