Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. The corrected Statement of Problem 1069 holds: there is an absolute constant such that any points in the plane determine fewer than lines containing at least of them, for every . This is Theorem 2 of Szemerédi and Trotter, a short consequence of their Theorem 1, the incidence bound for points and lines when : a family of lines each with at least points carries at least incidences. Since , each such line is determined by two of the points, so ; if , comparing the two bounds gives , and if , then because . Either way . The site's wording, whose range has no lower end, fails at , as the problem page's Notes record; the theorem proves the corrected Statement in full. Erdős's 1987 problem paper (card, Section 2, p. 169) describes the statement as a conjecture of Croft, Purdy and Erdős and records this proof.
Acceptance. The paper is refereed: E. Szemerédi and W. T. Trotter, Jr.,
Extremal problems in discrete geometry, Combinatorica 3 (1983), no. 3-4,
381–392; the page is dated to the issue month, September 1983, which the
publisher's record gives. Thomas Bloom, the site's curator, marks the problem
solved and credits this paper on the problem's page at erdosproblems.com (page
last edited 2025-10-02); that credit is the reviewed evidence. No Lean proof
is recorded.
What remains. The best constant is unknown. At the lattice points give lines each containing points, which Erdős thought might be extremal, and Sah's construction gives such lines. The site cites it as Sah, Chih-Han, The rich line problem of P. Erdős (1987), 123–125, without a venue; Erdős's paper says the construction appears for the first time in the proceedings of the Siófok meeting, the volume holding Erdős's own paper.