Number of Distances Separating Points Has a New Bound
Mathematicians have struggled to prove Falconer’s Conjecture, a simple, but far-reaching, hypothesis about the distances between points. They’re finally getting close. The post Number of Distances Separating Points Has a New Bound first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Scatter three points in a plane, then measure the distances between every pair of them. In all likelihood, you’ll find three different distances. But if you arrange the points in an equilateral triangle, then every distance is the same. In a plane, this is impossible to do with four points. The smallest number of distances you can engineer is 2 — the edges and diagonals of a square.
Originally published in Quanta Abstractions.
