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A survey of Sylvester's problem and its generalizations

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Summary

LetP be a finite set of three or more noncollinear points in the plane. A line which contains two or more points ofP is called aconnecting line (determined byP), and we call a connecting lineordinary if it contains precisely two points ofP. Almost a century ago, Sylvester posed the disarmingly simple question:Must every set P determine at least one ordinary line? No solution was offered at that time and the problem seemed to have been forgotten. Forty years later it was independently rediscovered by Erdös, and solved by Gallai. In 1943 Erdös proposed the problem in the American Mathematical Monthly, still unaware that it had been asked fifty years earlier, and the following year Gallai's solution appeared in print. Since then there has appeared a substantial literature on the problem and its generalizations.

In this survey we review, in the first two sections, Sylvester's problem and its generalization to higher dimension. Then we gather results about the connecting lines, that is, the lines containing two or more of the points. Following this we look at the generalization to finite collections of sets of points. Finally, the points will be colored and the search will be for monochromatic connecting lines.

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  1. Department of Mathematics, McGill University, Burnside Hall, 805 Sherbrooke St. West, H3A 2K6, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

    P. Borwein & W. O. J. Moser

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  1. P. Borwein
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Borwein, P., Moser, W.O.J. A survey of Sylvester's problem and its generalizations. Aeq. Math. 40, 111–135 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02112289

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