Are lines much bigger than line segments?
Abstract
We pose the following conjecture: (*) If A is the union of line segments in Rn, and B is the union of the corresponding full lines then the Hausdorff dimensions of A and B agree. We prove that this conjecture would imply that every Besicovitch set (compact set that contains line segments in every direction) in Rn has Hausdorff dimension at least n-1 and (upper) Minkowski dimension n. We also prove that conjecture (*) holds if the Hausdorff dimension of B is at most 2, so in particular it holds in the plane.
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