Green's Open Problem 85

Carbery’s rectangle problem

References:

• [Gr24] Green, Ben. "100 open problems." (2024).
• [CCW99] Carbery, Anthony, Michael Christ, and James Wright. "Multidimensional van der Corput and sublevel set estimates." Journal of the American Mathematical Society 12.4 (1999): 981-1015 Section 6.
• [Ke00] Keleti, Tamás. "Density and covering properties of intervals of ℝn." Mathematika 47.1-2 (2000): 229-242.
• [KKM02] Katz, Nets Hawk, Elliot Krop, and Mauro Maggioni. "Remarks on the box problem." Mathematical Research Letters 9.4 (2002): 515-520.
• [Mu02] Mubayi, Dhruv. "Some exact results and new asymptotics for hypergraph Turán numbers." Combinatorics, Probability and Computing 11.3 (2002): 299-309 Conjecture 1.4.
• [CPZ20] Conlon, David, Cosmin Pohoata, and Dmitriy Zakharov. "Random multilinear maps and the Erd\H {o} s box problem." arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.09024 (2020).

theorem Green85.green_85 : sorry ↔ ∃ c > 0, ∀ (A : Set (ℝ × ℝ)), IsOpen A → A ⊆ Set.Icc 0 1 ×ˢ Set.Icc 0 1 → A.Nonempty → have α := (MeasureTheory.volume A).toReal; ∃ (x₁ : ℝ) (x₂ : ℝ) (y₁ : ℝ) (y₂ : ℝ), {(x₁, y₁), (x₂, y₁), (x₂, y₂), (x₁, y₂)} ⊆ A ∧ c * α ^ 2 ≤ |x₁ - x₂| * |y₁ - y₂|

Suppose that $A$ is an open subset of $[0, 1]^2$ with measure $\alpha$. Are there four points in $A$ determining an axis-parallel rectangle with area $\gt c \alpha^2$?

theorem Green85.green_85_loose : ∃ c > 0, ∀ (A : Set (ℝ × ℝ)), IsOpen A → A ⊆ Set.Icc 0 1 ×ˢ Set.Icc 0 1 → A.Nonempty → have α := (MeasureTheory.volume A).toReal; ∃ (x₁ : ℝ) (x₂ : ℝ) (y₁ : ℝ) (y₂ : ℝ), {(x₁, y₁), (x₂, y₁), (x₂, y₂), (x₁, y₂)} ⊆ A ∧ α ^ 2 * (Real.log (1 / α))⁻¹ ≤ |x₁ - x₂| * |y₁ - y₂|

From [Gr24] "It is quite easy to show using Cauchy-Schwarz that there must be such a rectangle with area $\gg \alpha^2 (\log 1/\alpha)^{-1}$."