Point-line incidences in space

  • Authors:
  • Micha Sharir;Emo Welzl

  • Affiliations:
  • Tel Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel and New York University, New York, NY;ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the eighteenth annual symposium on Computational geometry
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

(MATH) Given a set L of n lines in $\reals^3$, let JL denote the set of all joints of L; joints are points in $\reals^3$ that are incident to at least three non-coplanar lines in L. We show that there are at most O(n 5/3) incidences between JL and L.(MATH) This result leads to related questions about incidences between L and a set P of m points in $\reals^3$: First, we associate with every point p &egr; P the minimum number of planes it takes to cover all lines incident to p. Then the sum of these numbers is at most $$ O(m^4/7n^5/7+m+n) ~. $$ Second, if each line forms a fixed given non-zero angle with the xy-plane---we say the lines are equally inclined--- then the number of (real) incidences is at most $$ O(\min\m^3/4n^1/2\kappa(m),m^4/7n^5/7\ + m + n) ~, $$ where $\kappa(m) = (\log m)^O(\alpha^2(m))$, and $\alpha(m)$ is the slowly growing inverse Ackermann function. These bounds are smaller than the tight Szemerédi-Trotter bound for point-line incidences in $\reals^2$, unless both bounds are linear. They are the first results of that type on incidences between points and 1-dimensional objects in $\reals^3$. This research was stimulated by a question raised by G. Elekes.