Abstract
The Borsuk number of a set S of diameter d > 0 in Euclidean n-space is the smallest value of m such that S can be partitioned into m sets of diameters less than d. Our aim is to generalize this notion in the following way: The k -fold Borsuk number of such a set S is the smallest value of m such that there is a k-fold cover of S with m sets of diameters less than d. In this paper we characterize the k-fold Borsuk numbers of sets in the Euclidean plane, give bounds for those of centrally symmetric sets, smooth bodies and convex bodies of constant width, and examine them for finite point sets in the Euclidean 3-space.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
V. G. Boltyanskii, The problem on illuminating the boundary of a convex body, Izv. Mold. Filiala AN SSSR 76 (1960), 77–84.
V. G. Boltyanskii and I. C. Gohberg, The Decomposition of Figures into Smaller Parts, translated from Russian, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1980.
V. Boltyanskii, H. Martini and P. S. Soltan, Excursions into Combinatorial Geometry, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1997.
T. Bonnesen, and W. Fenchel, Theorie der Konvexen Körper, Chelsea, New York, 1948, pp. 130–135.
K. Borsuk, Drei Sätze über die n-dimensionale eukildische Sphäre, Fundamental Mathematics 20 (1933), 177–190.
V. L. Dol’nikov, Some properties of graphs of diameters, Discrete and Computational Geometry 24 (2000), 293–299.
W. J. Firey, Isoperimetric ratios of Reuleaux polygons, Pacific Journal of Mathematics 10 (1960), 823–829.
D. Gale, Neighboring vertices on a convex polyhedron, in Linear Inequalities and Related Systems (H. W. Kuhn and A. W. Tucker, eds.), Annals of Mathematics Studies, Vol. 38, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1956, pp. 255–264.
B. Grünbaum, A proof of Vázsonyi’s conjecture, Bulletin of the Research Council of Israel. Section A 6 (1956), 77–78.
B. Grünbaum, Borsuk’s problem and related questions, in Convexity, Proceedings of the Seventh Symposium in Pure Mathematics of the American Mathematical Society, Seattle, WA, 1961, pp. 271–284.
H. Hadwiger, Überdeckung einer Menge durch Mengen kleineren Durchmessers, Commentarii Mathematici Helvetici 18 (1945), 73–75.
H. Hadwiger, Mitteilung betreffend meine Note: Überdeckung einer Menge durch Mengen kleineren Durchmessers, Commentarii Mathematici Helvetici 19 (1946), 72–73.
A. Heppes, Beweis einer Vermutung von A. Vázsonyi, Acta Mathematica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 7 (1956), 463–466.
A. Heppes and P. Révész, Zum Borsukschen Zerteilungsproblem, Acta Mathematica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 7 (1956), 159–162.
A. Heppes and W. Kuperberg, Cylindrical partitions of convex bodies, in Combinatorial and Computation Geometry, (J. E. Goodman et al., eds.), Mathematical Sciences Research Institute Publications, Vol. 52, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005, pp. 399–407.
T. R. Jensen and F. B. Shepherd, Note on a conjecture of Toft, Combinatorica 15 (1995), 373–377.
J. Kahn, and G. Kalai, A counterexample to Borsuk’s conjecture, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 29 (1993), 60–62.
Y. S. Kupitz, H. Martini and M. A. Perles, Ball polytopes and the Vázsonyi problem, Acta Mathematica Hungarica 126 (2010), 99–163.
W. Lin, D. D.-F. Liu, and X. Zhu, Multi-coloring the Mycielskians of graphs, Journal of Graph Theory 63 (2010), 311–323.
W. Lin, J. Wu, P. C. B. Lam and G. Gu, Several parameters of generalized Mycielskians, Discrete Applied Mathematics 154 (2006), 1173–1182.
A. M. Raigorodskii, On a bound in Borsuk’s problem, Russian Mathematical Surveys 54(N2) (1999), 453–454.
A. M. Raigorodskii, Borsuk’s problem for (0, 1)-polytopes and cross-polytopes, Doklady Mathematics 65 (2002), 413–416, and Doklady Akademii Nauk 384(5) (2002), 593–597.
A. M. Raigorodskii, The Borsuk and Grünbaum problems for lattice polytopes, Izvestiya: Mathematics 69(N3) (2005), 513–537.
A. M. Raigorodskii, Around Borsuk’s hypothesis, Journal of Mathematical Sciences 154 (2008), 604–623, translation from Sovrem Mat., Fundam. Napravl. 23 (2007), 147–164.
A. S. Riesling, Borsuk’s problem in three-dimensional spaces of constant curvature, Ukr. Geom. Sb. 11 (1971), 78–83.
C. A. Rogers, Symmetrical sets of constant width and their partitions, Mathematika 18 (1971), 105–111.
G. T. Sallee, Reuleaux polytopes, Mathematika 17 (1970), 315–328.
S. Stahl, n-tuple colorings and associated graphs, The Journal of Combinatorial Theory 20 (1976), 185–203.
S. Sutorik, Instability of multicoloring and multiclique sequence, MSc. thesis, University of Colorado at Denver, Denver, CO, 1995.
K. J. Swanepoel, A new proof of Vázsonyi’s conjecture, The Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series A 115 (2008), 888–892.
C. Tardif, Fractional chromatic numbers of cones over graphs, The Journal of Graph Theory 38 (2001), 87–94.
B. Toft, Problem 11, in Recent Advances in Graph Theory, Academia Praha, Prague, 1975, pp. 543–544.
G. M. Ziegler, Coloring Hamming graphs, optimal binary codes, and the 0/1-Borsuk problem in low dimensions, in Computational Discrete Mathematics, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 2122, Springer, Berlin, 2001, pp. 159–171.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Dedicated to Aladár Heppes on his 80th birthday
The support of the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences is gratefully acknowledged
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Hujter, M., Lángi, Z. On the multiple Borsuk numbers of sets. Isr. J. Math. 199, 219–239 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11856-013-0048-1
Received:
Revised:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11856-013-0048-1