On a conjecture by Anthony Hill

Abstract

In the 1950's, English painter Anthony Hill described drawings of complete graphs $K_n$ in the plane having precisely $$H(n) = \tfrac{1}{4}\lfloor \tfrac{n}{2}\rfloor \, \lfloor \tfrac{n-1}{2}\rfloor \, \lfloor \tfrac{n-2}{2}\rfloor \,\lfloor \tfrac{n-3}{2}\rfloor$$ crossings. It became a conjecture that this number is minimum possible and, despite serious efforts, the conjecture is still widely open. Another way of drawing $K_n$ with the same number of crossings was found by Bla\v{z}ek and Koman in 1963. In this note we provide, for the first time, a very general construction of drawings attaining the same bound. Surprisingly, the proof is extremely short and may as well qualify as a "book proof". In particular, it gives a very simple explanation of the phenomenon discovered by Moon in 1968 that a random set of $n$ points on the unit sphere $\SS^2$ in $\RR^3$ joined by geodesics gives rise to a drawing whose number of crossings asymptotically approaches the Hill value $H(n)$.