arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Alfredo Hubard.
We consider incidences among colored sets of lines in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and examine whether the existence of certain concurrences between lines of $k$ colors force the existence of at least one concurrence between lines of $k+1$ colors. This question is relevant for problems in 3D reconstruction in computer vision.
We prove several new results around Gromov's waist theorem. We give a simple proof of Vaaler's theorem on sections of the unit cube using the Borsuk--Ulam--Crofton technique. We consider waists of real and complex projective spaces, flat tori, convex bodies in Euclidean space. We establish waist-type results in terms of the Hausdorff measure.
The classical theorem of Fáry states that every planar graph can be represented by an embedding in which every edge is represented by a straight line segment. We consider generalizations of Fáry's theorem to surfaces equipped with Riemannian metrics. In this setting, we require that every edge is drawn as a shortest path between its two endpoints and we call an embedding with this property a shortest path embedding. The main question addressed in this paper is whether given a closed surface S, there exists a Riemannian metric for which every topologically embeddable graph admits a shortest path embedding. This question is also motivated by various problems regarding crossing numbers on surfaces. We observe that the round metrics on the sphere and the projective plane have this property. We provide flat metrics on the torus and the Klein bottle which also have this property. Then we show that for the unit square flat metric on the Klein bottle there exists a graph without shortest path embeddings. We show, moreover, that for large g, there exist graphs G embeddable into the orientable surface of genus g, such that with large probability a random hyperbolic metric does not admit a shortest path embedding of G, where the probability measure is proportional to the Weil-Petersson volume on moduli space. Finally, we construct a hyperbolic metric on every orientable surface S of genus g, such that every graph embeddable into S can be embedded so that every edge is a concatenation of at most O(g) shortest paths.
We show that, for any prime power n and any convex body K (i.e., a compact convex set with interior) in Rd, there exists a partition of K into n convex sets with equal volumes and equal surface areas. Similar results regarding equipartitions with respect to continuous functionals and absolutely continuous measures on convex bodies are also proven. These include a generalization of the ham-sandwich theorem to arbitrary number of convex pieces confirming a conjecture of Kaneko and Kano, a similar generalization of perfect partitions of a cake and its icing, and a generalization of the Gromov-Borsuk-Ulam theorem for convex sets in the model spaces of constant curvature. Most of the results in this paper appear in arxiv:1011.4762 and in arxiv:1010.4611. Since the main results and techniques there are essentially the same, we have merged the papers for journal publication. In this version we also provide a technical alternative to a part of the proof of the main topological result that avoids the use of compactly supported homology.
We introduce combinatorial types of arrangements of convex bodies, extending order types of point sets to arrangements of convex bodies, and study their realization spaces. Our main results witness a trade-off between the combinatorial complexity of the bodies and the topological complexity of their realization space. First, we show that every combinatorial type is realizable and its realization space is contractible under mild assumptions. Second, we prove a universality theorem that says the restriction of the realization space to arrangements polygons with a bounded number of vertices can have the homotopy type of any primary semialgebraic set.
How much cutting is needed to simplify the topology of a surface? We provide bounds for several instances of this question, for the minimum length of topologically non-trivial closed curves, pants decompositions, and cut graphs with a given combinatorial map in triangulated combinatorial surfaces (or their dual cross-metric counterpart). Our work builds upon Riemannian systolic inequalities, which bound the minimum length of non-trivial closed curves in terms of the genus and the area of the surface. We first describe a systematic way to translate Riemannian systolic inequalities to a discrete setting, and vice-versa. This implies a conjecture by Przytycka and Przytycki from 1993, a number of new systolic inequalities in the discrete setting, and the fact that a theorem of Hutchinson on the edge-width of triangulated surfaces and Gromov's systolic inequality for surfaces are essentially equivalent. We also discuss how these proofs generalize to higher dimensions. Then we focus on topological decompositions of surfaces. Relying on ideas of Buser, we prove the existence of pants decompositions of length O(g^{3/2}n^{1/2}) for any triangulated combinatorial surface of genus g with n triangles, and describe an O(gn)-time algorithm to compute such a decomposition. Finally, we consider the problem of embedding a cut graph (or more generally a cellular graph) with a given combinatorial map on a given surface. Using random triangulations, we prove (essentially) that, for any choice of a combinatorial map, there are some surfaces on which any cellular embedding with that combinatorial map has length superlinear in the number of triangles of the triangulated combinatorial surface. There is also a similar result for graphs embedded on polyhedral triangulations.
In this paper we show that every sufficiently large family of convex bodies in the plane has a large subfamily in convex position provided that the number of common tangents of each pair of bodies is bounded and every subfamily of size five is in convex position. (If each pair of bodies have at most two common tangents it is enough to assume that every triple is in convex position, and likewise, if each pair of bodies have at most four common tangents it is enough to assume that every quadruple is in convex position.) This confirms a conjecture of Pach and Toth, and generalizes a theorem of Bisztriczky and Fejes Toth. Our results on families of convex bodies are consequences of more general Ramsey-type results about the crossing patterns of systems of graphs of continuous functions $f:[0,1] \to \mathbb{R}$. On our way towards proving the Pach-Toth conjecture we obtain a combinatorial characterization of such systems of graphs in which all subsystems of equal size induce equivalent crossing patterns. These highly organized structures are what we call regular systems of paths and they are natural generalizations of the notions of cups and caps from the famous theorem of Erdos and Szekeres. The characterization of regular systems is combinatorial and introduces some auxiliary structures which may be of independent interest.
We show an equivalence between a conjecture of Bisztriczky and Fejes T{ó}th about arrangements of planar convex bodies and a conjecture of Goodman and Pollack about point sets in topological affine planes. As a corollary of this equivalence we improve the upper bound of Pach and Tóth on the Erdős-Szekeres theorem for disjoint convex bodies, as well as the recent upper bound obtained by Fox, Pach, Sudakov and Suk, on the Erdős-Szekeres theorem for non-crossing convex bodies. Our methods also imply improvements on the positive fraction Erd\H{os}-Szekeres theorem for disjoint (and non-crossing) convex bodies, as well as a generalization of the partitioned Erdős-Szekeres theorem of Pór and Valtr to arrangements of non-crossing convex bodies.
We show that, for any prime power p^k and any convex body K (i.e., a compact convex set with interior) in Rd, there exists a partition of K into p^k convex sets with equal volume and equal surface area. We derive this result from a more general one for absolutely continuous measures and continuous functionals on the space of convex bodies. This result was independently found by Roman Karasev generalizing work of Gromov and Memarian who proved it for the standard measure on the sphere and p=2. Our proof uses basics from the theory of optimal transport and equivariant topology. The topological ingredient is a Borsuk-Ulam type statement on configuration space with the standard action of the symmetric group. This result was discovered in increasing generality by Fuks, Vaseliev and Karasev. We include a detailed proof and discuss how it relates to Gromov's proof for the case p=2.
We define the crossing number for an embedding of a graph G into R^3, and prove a lower bound on it which almost implies the classical crossing lemma. We also give sharp bounds on the space crossing numbers of pseudo-random graphs.
We generalize the ham sandwich theorem for the case of well separated measures. Given convex bodies $K_1,...,K_d$ in $\mathbb{R_d}$ and numbers $α_1,...,α_d \in [0, 1]$, we give a sufficient condition for existence and uniqueness of an (oriented)halfspace H with Vol($H \cap K_i$)= $α_i \dot$ Vol$K_i$ for every i. The result is extended from convex bodies to measures.
We give new bounds on the Erdos-Szekeres theorems for convex bodies of Bisztriczky and Fejes Toth and of Pach and Toth. We derive them from a combinatorial characterization of convex position of a family of planar convex bodies. This characterization confirms that the concept of Order Type for points can be extended to noncrossing families of convex bodies in a geometrically meaningful way.