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Ordinary Line


Given an arrangement of points, a line containing just two of them is called an ordinary line. Dirac (1951) conjectured that every sufficiently set of n noncollinear points contains at least n/2 ordinary lines (Borwein and Bailey 2003, p. 18).

Csima and Sawyer (1993) proved that for an n>=3 arrangement of points, at least 6n/13 lines must be ordinary. Only two exceptions are known for Dirac's conjecture: the Kelly-Moser configuration (7 points, 3 ordinary lines; cf. Fano plane) and McKee's configuration (13 points, 6 ordinary lines).

OrdinaryLineFinschiFukuda

Silva and Fukuda conjectured that for any noncollinear, equally distributed, line-separable arrangement of points of two colors, there is at least one bichromatic ordinary line. Finschi and Fukuda found a unique nine-point counterexample in a study of 15296266 distinct configurations (Malkevitch).


See also

Collinear, General Position, Incident, Near-Pencil, Ordinary Line Graph, Ordinary Point, Special Point, Sylvester Graph

Portions of this entry contributed by Herve Bronnimann

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References

Borwein, J. and Bailey, D. Mathematics by Experiment: Plausible Reasoning in the 21st Century. Wellesley, MA: A K Peters, 2003.Coxeter, H. S. M. "A Problem of Collinear Points." Amer. Math. Monthly 55, 26-28, 1948.Coxeter, H. S. M. The Real Projective Plane, 3rd ed. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993.Csima, J. and Sawyer, E. "There Exist 6n/13 Ordinary Points." Disc. Comput. Geom. 9, 187-202, 1993.de Bruijn, N. G. and Erdős, P. "On a Combinatorial Problem." Hederl. Adad. Wetenach. 51, 1277-1279, 1948.Dirac, G. A. "Collinearity Properties of Sets of Points." Quart. J. Math. 2, 221-227, 1951.Erdős, P. "Problem 4065." Amer. Math. Monthly 51, 169, 1944.Felsner, S. Geometric Graphs and Arrangements. Wiesbaden, Germany: Vieweg, 2004.Guy, R. K. "Unsolved Problems Come of Age." Amer. Math. Monthly 96, 903-909, 1989.Kaneko, A. and Kano, M. "Discrete Geometry on Red and Blue Points in the Plane." http://gorogoro.cis.ibaraki.ac.jp/web/papers/kano2003-48.pdf.Kelly, L. M. and Moser, W. O. J. "On the Number of Ordinary Lines Determined by n Points." Canad. J. Math. 1, 210-219, 1958.Lang, D. W. "The Dual of a Well-Known Theorem." Math. Gaz. 39, 314, 1955.Malkevitch, J. "A Discrete Geometrical Gem." http://www.ams.org/featurecolumn/archive/sylvester1.html.Motzkin, T. "The Lines and Planes Connecting the Points of a Finite Set." Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 70, 451-463, 1951.Sylvester, J. J. "Mathematical Question 11851." Educational Times 59, 98, 1893.

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Ordinary Line

Cite this as:

Bronnimann, Herve and Weisstein, Eric W. "Ordinary Line." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/OrdinaryLine.html

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