According to a conjecture of Pach, there are O(n) tangent pairs among any family of n Jordan arcs in which every pair of arcs has precisely one common point and no three arcs share a common point. This conjecture was proved for two special cases, however, for the general case the currently best upper bound is only O(n^{7/4}). This is also the best known bound on the number of tangencies in the relaxed case where every pair of arcs has at most one common point. We improve the bounds for the latter and former cases to O(n^{5/3}) and O(n^{3/2}), respectively. We also consider a few other variants of these questions, for example, we show that if the arcs are x-monotone, each pair intersects at most once and their left endpoints lie on a common vertical line, then the maximum number of tangencies is Θ(n^{4/3}). Without this last condition the number of tangencies is O(n^{4/3}(log n)^{1/3}), improving a previous bound of Pach and Sharir. Along the way we prove a graph-theoretic theorem which extends a result of Erdős and Simonovits and may be of independent interest.

A long-standing open conjecture of Branko Grünbaum from 1972 states that any arrangement of n pairwise intersecting pseudocircles in the plane can have at most 2n-2 digons. Agarwal et al. proved this conjecture for arrangements in which there is a common point surrounded by all pseudocircles. Recently, Felsner, Roch and Scheucher showed that Grünbaum’s conjecture is true for arrangements of pseudocircles in which there are three pseudocircles every pair of which creates a digon. In this paper we prove this over 50-year-old conjecture of Grünbaum for any arrangement of pairwise intersecting circles in the plane.

Abstract What is the maximum number of intersections of the boundaries of a simple m-gon and a simple n-gon? This is a basic question in combinatorial geometry, and the answer is easy if at least one of m and n is even: If both m and n are even, then every pair of sides may cross and so the answer is mn. If exactly one polygon, say the n-gon, has an odd number of sides, it can intersect each side of the m-gon polygon at most $$n-1$$ n - 1 times; hence there are at most $$mn-m$$ m n - m intersections. It is not hard to construct examples that meet these bounds. If both m and n are odd, the best known construction has $$mn-(m+n)+3$$ m n - ( m + n ) + 3 intersections, and it is conjectured that this is the maximum. However, the best known upper bound is only $$mn-(m + \lceil {n}/{6} \rceil )$$ m n - ( m + ⌈ n / 6 ⌉ ) , for $$m \ge n$$ m ≥ n . We prove a new upper bound of $$mn-(m+n)+C$$ m n - ( m + n ) + C for some constant C, which is optimal apart from the value of C.

What is the maximum number of intersections of the boundaries of a simple m-gon and a simple n-gon, assuming general position? This is a basic question in combinatorial geometry, and the answer is easy if at least one of m and n is even. If both m and n are odd, the best known construction has mn-(m+n)+3 intersections, and it is conjectured that this is the maximum. However, the best known upper bound is only mn-(m + ⌈ n/6 ⌉), for m ≥ n. We prove a new upper bound of mn-(m+n)+C for some constant C, which is optimal apart from the value of C.

What is the minimum number of colors that always suffice to color every planar set of points such that any disk that contains enough points contains two points of different colors? It is known that the answer to this question is either three or four. We show that three colors always suffice if the condition must be satisfied only by disks that contain a fixed point. Our result also holds, and is even tight, when instead of disks we consider their topological generalization, namely, pseudo-disks, with a nonempty intersection. Our solution uses the equivalence that a hypergraph can be realized by stabbed pseudo-disks if and only if it is ABAB-free. These hypergraphs are defined in a purely abstract, combinatorial way, and our proof that they are 3-chromatic is also combinatorial.

We consider the problem of 2-coloring geometric hypergraphs. Specifically, we show that there is a constant m such that any finite set of points in the plane $${\mathcal {S}} \subset {\mathbb {R}}^2$$ can be 2-colored such that every axis-parallel square that contains at least m points from $${\mathcal {S}}$$ contains points of both colors. Our proof is constructive, that is, it provides a polynomial-time algorithm for obtaining such a 2-coloring. By affine transformations this result immediately applies also when considering 2-coloring points with respect to homothets of a fixed parallelogram.

We prove that if an $n$-vertex graph $G$ can be drawn in the plane such that each pair of crossing edges is independent and there is a crossing-free edge that connects their endpoints, then $G$ has $O(n)$ edges. Graphs that admit such drawings are related to quasi-planar graphs and to maximal $1$-planar and fan-planar graphs.

We consider graphs that admit polyline drawings where all crossings occur at the same angle $\alpha\in (0,\frac{\pi}{2}]$. We prove that every graph on n vertices that admits such a polyline drawing with at most two bends per edge has $O(n)$ edges. This result remains true when each crossing occurs at an angle from a small set of angles. We also provide several extensions that might be of independent interest.

A topological graph is a graph drawn in the plane with vertices represented by points and edges as arcs connecting its vertices. A k-grid in a topological graph is a pair of subsets of the edge set, each of size k, such that every edge in one subset crosses every edge in the other subset. It is known that for a fixed constant k, every n-vertex topological graph with no k-grid has O(n) edges.

A finite planar point set P is called a magic configuration if there is an assignment of positive weights to the points of P such that, for everyline l determined by P, the sum of the weights of all points of P on l equals 1. We prove a conjecture of Murty from 1971 and show that a magic configuration consists either of points in general position, or all points are collinear, with the possible exception of one point, or they form a special configuration of 7 points.

We show that the maximum number of edges in a topological graph on n vertices and with no four pairwise crossing edges is O(n).