Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
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Claim. Let be a finite set whose nonzero pairwise distances take exactly values. Then . For this bounds the sets of Problem 502 by , and since an infinite two-distance set would contain finite two-distance subsets of every size, no infinite such set exists.
Covers. The part upper_bound of the corrected Statement: the bound
on every two-distance set in . With
the lower construction of points, which settles the other
part, it gives the asymptotic behavior of the largest size,
which the problem asks for.
The argument. The paper is the second part of the authors' work on -distance sets and proves the bound through the linear independence of a family of polynomials attached to the points. Its theorem is restated and reproved, by a different method, in Petrov and Pohoata's note, which has its own claim page in this folder and whose [[../library/distance_problems/petrov_2021_remark_sets_few_distances/theorem_1_1|Theorem 1.1 page]] gives the complete proof of the same bound.
Acceptance. The paper is refereed: E. Bannai, E. Bannai and D. Stanton, An upper bound for the cardinality of an -distance subset in real Euclidean space, II, Combinatorica 3 (1983), no. 2, 147–152. The curator of erdosproblems.com, Thomas Bloom, marks the problem solved and credits the upper bound to this paper.