Forced Convex n -Gons in the Plane

In a seminal paper from 1935, Erdős and Szekeres showed that for each n there exists a least value g(n) such that any subset of g(n) points in the plane in general position must always contain the vertices of a convex n -gon. In particular, they obtained the bounds which have stood unchanged since then. In this paper we remove the +1 from the upper bound for n ≥ 4 . <lsiheader> <onlinepub>26 June, 1998 <editor>Editors-in-Chief: &lsilt;a href=../edboard.html#chiefs&lsigt;Jacob E. Goodman, Richard Pollack&lsilt;/a&lsigt; <pdfname>19n3p367.pdf <pdfexist>yes <htmlexist>no <htmlfexist>no <texexist>yes <sectionname> </lsiheader> Received January 1, 1997, and in revised form June 6, 1997.