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Sets that contain their circle centers

Greg Martin
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Abstract

Say that a subset S of the plane is a "circle-center set" if S is not a subset of a line, and whenever we choose three noncollinear points from S, the center of the unique circle through those three points is also an element of S. A problem appearing on the Macalester College Problem of the Week website was to prove that a finite set of points in the plane, no three lying on a common line, cannot be a circle-center set. Various solutions to this problem that did not use the full strength of the hypotheses appeared, and the conjecture was subsequently made that every circle-center set is unbounded. In this article, we prove a stronger assertion, namely that every circle-center set is dense in the plane, or equivalently that the only closed circle-center set is the entire plane. Along the way we show connections between our geometrical method of proof and number theory, real analysis, and topology.

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Greg Martin. 2007-03-29. Sets that contain their circle centers. https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0703860

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