Making Triangles Colorful

Abstract

We prove that for any point set P in the plane, a triangle T, and a positive integer k, there exists a coloring of P with k colors such that any homothetic copy of T containing at least ck^8 points of P, for some constant c, contains at least one of each color. This is the first polynomial bound for range spaces induced by homothetic polygons. The only previously known bound for this problem applies to the more general case of octants in R^3, but is doubly exponential.