On Sets of Monochromatic Objects in Bicolored Point Sets
2026-02-19 • Discrete Mathematics
Discrete Mathematics
AI summaryⓘ
The authors study points colored red or blue in a plane and look for lines or curves with points all of one color. They build on previous theorems to find many red or blue lines when no line has more than three points. They also explore special cases where blue points lie on a conic and show how the red points align under certain conditions. Additionally, they analyze randomness in coloring and find that certain point arrangements minimize single-color lines. Lastly, they investigate conditions where no all-one-color circles or conics appear.
Motzkin–Rabin theoremSylvester–Gallai theoremmonochromatic lineconiccubic curvecollinear pointsrandom coloringnear-pencil configurationgeometric combinatoricspoint set
Authors
Sujoy Bhore, Konrad Swanepoel
Abstract
Let $P$ be a set of $n$ points in the plane, not all on a line, each colored \emph{red} or \emph{blue}. The classical Motzkin--Rabin theorem guarantees the existence of a \emph{monochromatic} line. Motivated by the seminal work of Green and Tao (2013) on the Sylvester-Gallai theorem, we investigate the quantitative and structural properties of monochromatic geometric objects, such as lines, circles, and conics. We first show that if no line contains more than three points, then for all sufficiently large $n$ there are at least $n^{2}/24 - O(1)$ monochromatic lines. We then show a converse of a theorem of Jamison (1986): Given $n\ge 6$ blue points and $n$ red points, if the blue points lie on a conic and every line through two blue points contains a red point, then all red points are collinear. We also settle the smallest nontrivial case of a conjecture of Milićević (2018) by showing that if we have $5$ blue points with no three collinear and $5$ red points, if the blue points lie on a conic and every line through two blue points contains a red point, then all $10$ points lie on a cubic curve. Further, we analyze the random setting and show that, for any non-collinear set of $n\ge 10$ points independently colored red or blue, the expected number of monochromatic lines is minimized by the \emph{near-pencil} configuration. Finally, we examine monochromatic circles and conics, and exhibit several natural families in which no such monochromatic objects exist.