BenLund

An important family of incidence problems are discrete analogs of deep questions in geometric measure theory. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the finite field Kakeya conjecture, proved by Dvir in 2008. Dvir's proof introduced the polynomial method to incidence geometry, which led to the solution to many long-standing problems in the area. …

In the early 1980s, Beck proved that, if P is a set of n points in the real plane, and no more than g points of P lie on any single line, then there are $\Omega(n(n-g))$ lines that each contain at least 2 points of P. In 2016, I found a generalization of this theorem, …

We show that each perfect matching in a bipartite graph G intersects at least half of the perfect matchings in G. This result has equivalent formulations in terms of the permanent of the adjacency matrix of a graph, and in terms of derangements and permutations on graphs. We give several related results and open questions. This …

A convex lattice polytope is the convex hull of a set of integral points. Vershik conjectured the existence of a limit shape for random convex lattice polygons, and three proofs of this conjecture were given in the 1990s by Bárány, by Vershik, and by Sinai. To state this old result more precisely, there is a …

A family $\mathcal F$ of subsets of {1,2,…,n} is called maximal k-wise intersecting if every collection of at most k members from $\mathcal F$ has a common element, and moreover, no set can be added to $\mathcal F$ while preserving this property. In 1974, Erdős and Kleitman asked for the smallest possible size of a …

Suppose that $E$ is a subset of $\mathbb{F}_q^n$, so that each point is contained in $E$ with probability $\theta$, independently of all other points. Then, what is the probability that there is an $m$-dimensional affine subspace that contains at least $\ell$ points of $E$? What is the probability that $E$ intersects all $m$-dimensional affine subspaces? …

Given a set $E$ and a point $y$ in a vector space over a finite field, the radial projection $\pi_y(E)$ of $E$ from $y$ is the set of lines that through $y$ and points of $E$. Clearly, $|\pi_y(E)|$ is at most the minimum of the number of lines through $y$ and $|E|$. I will discuss …

For $d\ge 2$ and an odd prime power $q$, let $\mathbb{F}_q^d$ be the $d$-dimensional vector space over the finite field $\mathbb{F}_q$. The distance between two points $(x_1,\ldots,x_d)$ and $(y_1,\ldots,y_d)$ is defined to be $\sum_{i=1}^d (x_i-y_i)^2$. An influential result of Iosevich and Rudnev is: if $E \subset \mathbb{F}_q^d$ is sufficiently large and $t \in \mathbb{F}_q$, then …