skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Search for: All records

Award ID contains: 2241623

Note: When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external site maintained by the publisher. Some full text articles may not yet be available without a charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
What is a DOI Number?

Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from this site.

  1. Abstract Let$$\mathbb {F}_q^d$$ F q d be thed-dimensional vector space over the finite field withqelements. For a subset$$E\subseteq \mathbb {F}_q^d$$ E F q d and a fixed nonzero$$t\in \mathbb {F}_q$$ t F q , let$$\mathcal {H}_t(E)=\{h_y: y\in E\}$$ H t ( E ) = { h y : y E } , where$$h_y:E\rightarrow \{0,1\}$$ h y : E { 0 , 1 } is the indicator function of the set$$\{x\in E: x\cdot y=t\}$$ { x E : x · y = t } . Two of the authors, with Maxwell Sun, showed in the case$$d=3$$ d = 3 that if$$|E|\ge Cq^{\frac{11}{4}}$$ | E | C q 11 4 andqis sufficiently large, then the VC-dimension of$$\mathcal {H}_t(E)$$ H t ( E ) is 3. In this paper, we generalize the result to arbitrary dimension by showing that the VC-dimension of$$\mathcal {H}_t(E)$$ H t ( E ) isdwhenever$$E\subseteq \mathbb {F}_q^d$$ E F q d with$$|E|\ge C_d q^{d-\frac{1}{d-1}}$$ | E | C d q d - 1 d - 1
    more » « less
  2. Free, publicly-accessible full text available January 1, 2026
  3. J. Integer Seq. 27 (2024), no. 7, Art. 24.7.7, 18 pp. 
    more » « less
  4. During the Second World War, estimates of the number of tanks deployed by Germany were critically needed. The Allies adopted a successful statistical approach to estimate this information: assuming that the tanks are sequentially numbered starting from 1, if we observe k tanks from an unknown total of N, then the best linear unbiased estimator for N is M(1+1/k)-1 where M is the maximum observed serial number. However, in many situations, the original German Tank Problem is insufficient, since typically there are l > 1 factories, and tanks produced by different factories may have serial numbers in disjoint ranges that are often far separated.Clark, Gonye and Miller presented an unbiased estimator for N when the minimum serial number is unknown. Provided one identifies which samples correspond to which factory, one can then estimate each factory's range and summing the sizes of these ranges yields an estimate for the rival's total productivity. We construct an efficient procedure to estimate the total productivity and prove that it is effective when log l/log k is sufficiently small. In the final section, we show that given information about the gaps, we can make an estimator that performs orders of magnitude better when we have a small number of samples. 
    more » « less
  5. Let P(k) denote the largest size of a non-collinear point set in the plane admitting at most k distinct angles. We prove P(2) = P(3) = 5, and we characterize the optimal sets. We also leverage results from Fleischmann et al. [Disc. Comput. Geom. (2023)] to provide the general bounds k+2 ≤ P(k) ≤ 6k, although the upper bound may be improved pending progress toward the Strong Dirac Conjecture. We conjecture that the lower bound is tight, providing infinite families of configurations meeting the bound and ruling out several classes of potential counterexamples. 
    more » « less