Erdős-Szekeres-Type Problems in the Real Projective Plane

Abstract

We consider point sets in the real projective plane ℝ𝒫² and explore variants of classical extremal problems about planar point sets in this setting, with a main focus on Erdős-Szekeres-type problems.
We provide asymptotically tight bounds for a variant of the Erdős-Szekeres theorem about point sets in convex position in ℝ𝒫², which was initiated by Harborth and Möller in 1994. The notion of convex position in ℝ𝒫² agrees with the definition of convex sets introduced by Steinitz in 1913. 
For k ≥ 3, an (affine) k-hole in a finite set S ⊆ ℝ² is a set of k points from S in convex position with no point of S in the interior of their convex hull. After introducing a new notion of k-holes for points sets from ℝ𝒫², called projective k-holes, we find arbitrarily large finite sets of points from ℝ𝒫² with no projective 8-holes, providing an analogue of a classical result by Horton from 1983. We also prove that they contain only quadratically many projective k-holes for k ≤ 7. On the other hand, we show that the number of k-holes can be substantially larger in ℝ𝒫² than in ℝ² by constructing, for every k ∈ {3,… ,6}, sets of n points from ℝ² ⊂ ℝ𝒫² with Ω(n^{3-3/5k}) projective k-holes and only O(n²) affine k-holes. Last but not least, we prove several other results, for example about projective holes in random point sets in ℝ𝒫² and about some algorithmic aspects.
The study of extremal problems about point sets in ℝ𝒫² opens a new area of research, which we support by posing several open problems.