A new lower bound on Hadwiger-Debrunner numbers in the plane

Abstract

A family of sets F is said to satisfy the (p, q) property if among any p sets in F some q have a non-empty intersection. Hadwiger and Debrunner (1957) conjectured that for any p ≥ q ≥ d + 1 there exists an integer c = H Dd(p, q), such that any finite family of convex sets in Rd that satisfies the (p, q) property can be pierced by at most c points. In a celebrated result from 1992, Alon and Kleitman proved the conjecture. However, obtaining sharp bounds on H Dd(p, q), known as the Hadwiger-Debrunner numbers , is still a major open problem in discrete and computational geometry. The best currently known upper bound on the Hadwiger-Debrunner numbers in the plane is [MATH HERE] (for any Δ > 0 and p ≥ q ≥ q0(Δ)), obtained by combining results of Keller, Smorodinsky, and Tardos (SODA 2017) and of Rubin (FOCS 2018). The best lower bound is [MATH HERE], obtained by Bukh, Matousek and Nivasch more than 10 years ago. In this paper we improve the lower bound significantly by showing that H D2(p, q) ≥ p1+Ω(1/q). Furthermore, the bound is obtained by a family of lines and is tight for all families that have a bounded VC-dimension. Unlike previous bounds on the Hadwiger-Debrunner numbers, which mainly used the weak epsilon-net theorem, our bound stems from a surprising connection of the (p, q) problem to an old problem of Erdős on points in general position in the plane. We use a novel construction for Erdős problem, obtained recently by Balogh and Solymosi using the hypergraph container method, to get the lower bound on H D2(p, 3). We then generalize the bound to H D2(p, q) for q ≥ 3.